Sidnye (Queen of the Universe) — La’aryylia

By Scott Fitzgerald Gray

The only thing being scared was good for was giving up. When Emmet said it, Sidnye hadn’t realized how right he was.

She’d been afraid before. She was numb now.

Numb was better.

* * *

It’s one thing to talk about your world falling apart, as you’re hit with headaches and dreams that let you see things happen before they happen. It’s another thing when your world falls apart for real, because your school is attacked by alien bugs and you have to escape in a starship after your dog that you thought was dead saves your life.

It’s easy to feel the fear that comes from being dragged away from everything that used to be part of your life. It’s easy to feel angry when you’re told you’re not going back to that life, but no one will tell you why.

It’s easy to feel the fear and the anger turn to something so much worse when you realize that everything you thought you understood about your life is a lie...

* * *

EXCERPT

“I know who I am!” As Sidnye screamed, the shadow turned her voice to a pulse of thunder. McCune backed up to the wall, outlined in the glow from the bank of monitors behind him.

“No, Sidnye. You don’t know.”

The seriousness that edged his voice went way beyond anything Sidnye had ever heard before. She closed her eyes because she didn’t want to look at him, but when she did, the shadow flared in the darkness like lightning against grey sky.

“You need to learn who you are,” McCune said. “That’s what everything that’s happened is about...”

“Then tell me.”

Behind the shadow that wrapped him, McCune’s eyes showed the fear again. It was the same as Sidnye had seen on the farm. The same as when she thought the name the robot had said to her. It ran deep behind the grey of those eyes, turning them black where the shadow touched them. Sidnye could see her reflection there, her face dark, hair hanging lank. Her mouth was twisted with the anger and the shadow that scoured her.

“I can’t, Sidnye,” McCune said. “Please forgive me. Please try to understand...”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Insane Angel Studios
• Release date: Jun 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781927348352

Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Scott Fitzgerald Gray (9th-level layabout, vindictive good) is a writer of fantasy and speculative fiction, a fiction editor, a story editor, and an editor and designer of roleplaying games — all of which means he finally has the job he really wanted when he was sixteen. He shares his life in the Western Canadian hinterland with a schoolteacher, two itinerant daughters, and a number of animal companions. More info on him and his work (some of it even occasionally truthful) can be found by reading between the lines at insaneangel.com.

Book preview

SIDNYE (Queen of the Universe)

Book Two — LA’ARYYLIA

by

Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Cover, Design, and Typography

by (studio)Effigy

Published by Insane Angel Studios

insaneangel.com

Copyright © 2014 Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Smashwords Edition

Title Page • Dedication • Epigraph

PROLOGUE — La’aryylia

Chapter 1

PART ONE — Silence and Lies

Chapter 2 • Chapter 3 • Chapter 4

PART TWO — The Rules of Reflection

Chapter 5 • Chapter 6 • Chapter 7 • Chapter 8

PART THREE — The Outport Voice

Chapter 9 • Chapter 10 • Chapter 11

PART FOUR — The Prophecy

Chapter 12 • Chapter 13 • Chapter 14

PART FIVE — The Congress of the Rir

Chapter 15 • Chapter 16 • Chapter 17

EPILOGUE — The Lu’untem

Chapter 18

DATABASE ENTRY

Terran Tu’ul-Lirta (A Pronunciation Guide)

Fiction by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Colophon • Copyright

For the Disciples of Sidnye

with apologies for that

extensive time dilation effect

"George, George!" she cried when she could speak; and Mr. Darling woke to share her bliss, and Nana came rushing in. There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be forever barred.

— J.M. Barrie,

Peter Pan

IN THE CHAMBER built on pillars of shadow, the Thing With No Eyes slipped from its platform with the slow grace of a machine made of mercury. Measured movements carried it down the arch of darkness and across the floor below other platforms, and the shadowed spaces where other Things watched.

All around, a darkness loomed that wasn’t darkness. Not the black of late night or closed rooms, but a deep blue that was nearly black, and which had a texture that real darkness would have swallowed and lost. As the Thing With No Eyes moved, the deep blue swelled and roiled like liquid. However, instead of filtering the sound of the Thing like liquid would have, the blue that wasn’t darkness held each echo in perfect clarity, following the Thing as it passed across the emptiness of the softly sloping floor.

When the Thing spoke, the echo of its voice flared as light that traced its way along the pillars of shadow rising to platforms above. It uttered a shriek like the hiss of boiling glass, ebbing and flowing in waves where words should have been. In the chamber built on pillars of shadow, a fury burned beneath that sound, anchoring it with the strength of unseen iron. In its voice was a dismay built on disbelief and a terror that had died once. A terror that should never have been thought of again.

La’aryylia…

The Thing With No Eyes slipped through the chamber on long limbs, wrapped in a cloak of metal. A spectral drone rose from the circle of platforms, causing the light to flare once more. A clash of sound arose, the voice of the Thing With No Eyes echoing a dozen times over in waves of dissonant noise. The cloak flared like a web of mirrors, trapping the light as the Thing With No Eyes raged and twisted along the supple axis of its movement. Its steel shriek drowned out the counterpoint of shrieks that fell from the platforms above.

The One That Was Dead had only been lost. It wasn’t said in those words, because there were no words. But in the foundation of feeling beneath words, the Thing With No Eyes offered up its remembrance and darkness and rage.

Against no way to gauge the passing of time, there was no sense of how long the Thing With No Eyes seethed from one side of the chamber to the other. The rhythm of its coiling movement was a pattern that coursed and circled with the endless scream of its conviction. But time did pass, until the voice of the Thing With No Eyes was the only sound. It circled within the pattern of light that the cloak caught and held fast, its voice a scream of steel against the terrible silence.

Then from out of the static came an echo from all the platforms above. Fifteen voices joined with the first, one by one where the other Things channeled a dread anger and spoke the name that had died long ago.

La’aryylia…

It was a shriek of disbelief and madness and despair. A word that wasn’t a word. Only the feeling beneath words, carrying the sum of all the fear that the Thing With No Eyes drank in from the other Things as they cried out in grim chorus.

Around the chamber, the Thing With No Eyes turned to each of the platforms that rose on their pillars of light. The deep blue was drowned by the splintering brilliance that the voices in the chamber made. In the pulse of that light, the Things that watched were the same as the Thing With No Eyes. Curled in tightly wrapped cocoons of limbs and tail, they flexed smooth plates of wetly metallic skin as they bowed to face the Thing With No Eyes, showing no eyes of their own. No features marked their slanted heads above beaks of sharp-edged bone, gleaming like metal as they opened wide to hiss the twisted syllables.

La’aryylia.

One by one, each pillar flared out and flashed back to the deep blue that filled the chamber again. The last traces of light spiraled like dust motes, flaring out to nothing as they spun and collided and lost themselves in the silence. Then the Thing With No Eyes turned back to the platform from which it had descended, pulling itself up with long strides. Still feeling the rage that burned at its core, it knew the fear of the future that must not come to pass.

The One That Was Dead had only been lost. The One That Was Lost had only been hiding, and would be found now. The One That Was Lost would be fallen on with all the fury of the power it had tried to deceive and destroy.

The Thing With No Eyes slipped down into shadow and the curled embrace of limbs and tail that the cloak of metal wrapped tight. It felt the dread burned away by the fury of the moment. It sensed the prophecy that had been foretold and lost and born again. It knew that prophecy would be buried now beneath new futures that the fury made.

OF ALL THE THINGS that had happened to Sidnye, the dreams in which she found herself wandering through Emmet’s mind almost seemed too ordinary to worry about now. All the more important spaces in the part of her mind that liked to freak out were presently being taken up with alien bugs and starships, and fire and lightning from the sky, and seeing things in her head before they happened, and the number of times she’d almost died in the previous six hours.

Against all that, seeing and feeling the thoughts of her best friend while she slept seemed downright reasonable.

In the dream, she was walking. Which is to say, Emmet was walking. Like he might have just showered in warm battery acid, Sidnye felt pain shoot through every part of his body with each step, even as she felt him ignoring that pain in order to focus on taking in every single sight and sound of the starship they were on. That word was important to Emmet, she realized. Starship as opposed to spaceship, like it made some great kind of geek difference to everything that had happened to them.

Whatever the nature of the starship they were on, it only took until Emmet was out of sight of Sidnye and the docking station for him to realize it was built on the scale of the giant black robot’s size, not his. The docking station was the first place Sidnye and Emmet had been dumped after the four of them escaped from Earth. That was Emmet and Sidnye, McCune and Johann. The giant black robot was a giant black robot. Even in the dream, with access to the full range of Emmet’s vocabulary, that was the best Sidnye could come up with.

Emmet had to scramble to keep up with the robot’s precision gait as they moved through the shadows. Sidnye felt a sense of wonder in him that clashed and cracked against the nightmare blur the events of the previous day had made in her mind. The things Emmet had seen fractured and shifted in memory, frozen like key frames in a half-dozen video feeds. He’d seen Sidnye on the ice at the arena, in the last minutes of her hockey game. She’d been playing in goal for the first time ever, standing stock-still and managing to stop a blistering wrist shot that seemingly ignored gravity and all other laws of motion as it got sucked straight into her glove. He’d almost gotten killed by an out-of-control car. Sidnye had saved his life. Then Johann had nearly killed him.

Johann…

At the point where Sidnye touched Emmet’s mind, the name curdled an anger whose intensity deadened his pain. Even the limp in his leg faded for a half-dozen steps.

Johann was a reminder that the previous six hours were just the last salvo of insanity from the entire week before. Johann was supposed to have been a Silesian exchange student, but Emmet had figured out he was much more than that, even before the Manor had been hit by some kind of alien assault. His last sight of the school had been watching it burn as he and Sidnye, Johann and McCune fled two steps ahead of pursuit.

McCune. It was a different anger that twisted through him at that name. McCune turned his back on Emmet as Johann had been getting ready to kill him, or maim him, or whatever he was planning on doing. McCune, who was supposed to look after Emmet in his role as school counselor and dorm advisor, had turned into some kind of alien-killing ninja when no one was looking.

McCune had taken on monstrous armored bugs twice his size with a skill that told Emmet he’d done it before. Johann had fought with him, but Emmet slipped around the edges of that memory. The same alien monstrosities had pursued them even after they fled the school. One of them almost got Sidnye, but she’d been saved by her dog that was supposed to be dead. Two minutes later, they were strapped down in a starship and escaping from the Earth.

They’d escaped from the Earth.

In the dream, Sidnye felt that thought twist through Emmet with a terrible finality. He almost stumbled as he tried to keep up to the robot’s brisk six-legged walk.

He was following a six-legged robot.

From this point on, Emmet thought, nothing was ever going to make sense. In his head, in the dream, Sidnye found herself agreeing with him.

All the time during the alien attack and his escape from the school, Emmet had been aware of having no feeling in his face where it had connected with a freezing steel sign on the sidewalk earlier that night. That was when Sidnye had saved his life. However, whether the numbness had been the effect of adrenaline or hysteria or the pain in his chest overwhelming everything else, it was long gone now. It was only the fact he’d still been able to talk to Sidnye in the docking station where they’d been strapped in that told him his jaw hadn’t been broken by the impact.

He had enough pain everywhere else to make up for it, though. But even as he kept moving against that pain, Emmet suddenly couldn’t see any far wall where the floor ramped up ahead of them into faint light. As the robot started to climb, a tightness in Emmet’s chest flared hard. With everything else going on, he’d almost forgotten he was in serious danger of dropping dead at any moment. His arrhythmia was something he didn’t think about much, but the nonstop running he’d been doing all night was determined to change that.

As he broke into a run again to keep up to the robot, Emmet realized that even though they were climbing, he still felt as if he was on flat ground. As the robot rose up ahead of him, he glanced back to see that where they’d come from had seemingly risen behind them as they moved. He didn’t have time to think about it as the robot moved for an opening on the left-hand wall. An oversized round doorway was cut into the wall there, like a circle with its bottom chopped off. It revealed the same kind of ladderway that had opened up in the bottom of the ship when they were climbing up to it. Except this ladder was running sideways like a railway track.

The robot was pulling itself along the ladder, disappearing into shadow ahead, so Emmet ducked in to follow. As he did, the ladderway and the corridor behind him and the entire world of his senses gave a sudden heave that almost knocked him flat.

Frantic, he dropped to cling to the closest set of rungs above him, but they were suddenly below him now. He hung on for dear life as the ladderway pitched around him, the French fries he’d grabbed at the arena at first intermission threatening to leave him in a hurry. He wanted to shut his eyes, but he was fairly certain that would just make the sensation worse.

Above him, or below him, or somewhere in between as the world spun like a gyroscope, the robot deftly hauled itself along like nothing was happening. The confined space was just big enough for its massive body to slip through as its six limbs spidered out to pull it along.

Hey! Emmet shouted as he held on for dear life. The robot stopped and shifted, its eyeless head spinning to ratchet back toward him.

Hay is not available. The robot’s smoothly metallic voice carried a faintly musical echo in the ladderway. Nourishment simulators will be programmed for Terran-human consumption needs.

I mean why is everything going insane?

Sociological judgements require subjective analysis techniques for which the fabricated unit before you has not been constructed.

Emmet was seriously not in the mood for the robot’s overly literal translation skills. Why does it look to me like everything’s spinning up and down?

Synthetic gravitation fields within the craft are not active through interzone access conduits.

Slowly Emmet turned back to look behind him. With the view of the corridor they’d just left reminding him where he was, he felt the spinning slow down.

There’s no gravity here?

Certainly. Will this location be stopped at.

Emmet said nothing as he turned back. He tried to force his inner ear to accept that straight ahead of him was up. Slowly, the random lurching of his stomach was replaced by a more controlled lurching. He still had to hook his feet around the rungs below him before he could reach for the next rung above with a shaking hand, though.

When he reached the end of the ladderway and finally pulled/pushed himself up/over into the open chamber ahead, Emmet felt a sudden twist as he fell across/down to the floor. He was in a round space with a lot of what looked like mesh globes suspended along the walls. He didn’t have time to examine them, though. The robot was already pulling itself into another ladderway across from him, disappearing quickly from sight.

Emmet understood that he could have asked the robot what any of the things around him were. However, he understood at the same time how a big part of him didn’t want to know just yet. He followed silently through three more ladderways, each running at a slightly different angle than the one before. Any sense of where he was in relation to what had been the bottom of the ship when he came in got lost pretty quickly.

As the zero-g crawling got easier, Emmet found his agitation level dropping. That was when he fell through into the next chamber and saw the robot waiting for him instead of continuing on.

He looked up from the floor. Johann was hanging upside down above him. All Emmet’s agitation came back in a hurry.

Within the space of the dream, Sidnye felt the anger that flared in Emmet like white fire. A heat filled her mind as he scrambled to his feet, Johann shimmering as his image was filtered through sheer rage.

His clothes looked as though they’d been run though a blender after the fight at the Manor, during which he and McCune had engaged and held off a dozen of the insect-alien monstrosities. All of them had fought with some sort of light blades, whose very existence was a sharp stick in the eye of Emmet’s knowledge of physics. Though all sorts of questions were forming in his mind in response to that, he forced himself to let the curiosity go, so that his anger had room to uncoil all on its own.

The chamber they were in was maybe fifteen meters across, and the biggest space Emmet had seen so far on the ship. The walls were alive with light and covered with clustered structures. He could make out what looked like boxes and cables, and backlit metal grids, and glowing monitors in a dozen different shapes and configurations. Also, the ceiling high above was actually an upside-down floor. Emmet realized it in a strange moment of sudden clarity, though it still made no sense.

Emmet judged the upside-down floor to be something like seven meters overhead. It had been the same in the docking station, though the curving corridor was only half that height. He was close enough that he could see Johann’s eyes on him as he moved. Even as he tried and failed to read the upside-down expression, he had to force himself to realize Johann wasn’t just hanging upside down, like his feet were hooked into something. He was actually upside down on a floor whose gravity was pulling up, like gravity was definitely not supposed to do.

To all sides, light flared along the walls, pulsing a faint web of color as Emmet paced and the robot waited. Johann hopped from the upside-down floor to a black disk that was floating somehow with no support above/below the floor/ceiling. Its underside pulsed with blue-white light. Johann was riding it like an oversized longboard as it whipped past overhead.

Where is Sidnye? Johann called out. The robot answered before Emmet realized the question had been directed there.

Sidnye has remained with the entity who is a dog. Accommodations are prepared imminently.

The robot rose on two legs. Around the chamber, Emmet noticed a regular series of large T-shaped cleats attached halfway up the wall, like someone might want to tie a boat up in the middle of the room for some reason. His stomach gave a lurch as the robot grasped one of those cleats, swinging itself so that it was suddenly dropping up as it passed the midway point of the room. Like its feet had been sucked toward the other floor, the robot touched down. Then it slipped out another horizontal ladderway and left Emmet and Johann alone.

The floating disk had stopped in the center of the chamber above. Johann’s hands were a blur of motion across a horseshoe-shaped computer console, or at least that was the closest thing Emmet could approximate it to. Whatever it was, it was oversized and it was black like everything else in the room. The web of pulsing light that streaked the walls was centered around it.

Be silent. Stand still. Touch nothing, Johann said. He spun past a field of what looked like junction boxes spreading along the wall, soaring around to the other side of the ceiling and a fountain of glowing wires.

What is all this? Emmet called out to his back as he passed.

Be silent. Stand still, touching nothing. The disk circled the fountain twice as Johann stared at it as if it meant something.

Touch this. Emmet made a particularly rude gesture. Then he had to remember to invert it so Johann could get the full effect. Even as he got the feeling he could read Johann’s upside-down expression this time, the light across the chamber flared brighter. At the console as Johann rode the disk back, the shifting pattern locked to a single repeating pulse of color.

Johann tapped the disk with his foot and it shot up underneath him, meaning it was suddenly punching down toward Emmet where he stood. Johann crouched to grab the disk’s edge like a snowboard, twisting in midair. It flipped like the robot had. Emmet’s stomach lurched again.

Johann surfed down and straight past him, so that Emmet had to stumble back and hit the floor to avoid him. A flash of white as he went by was the light blade handgrip at his waist. It was attached to Johann’s belt by a hook at its not-a-lens end. Almost without thinking, Emmet made a sudden grab. It was a fast move, driven as much by having to scramble out of Johann’s way as it was by the non-Silesian-not-exchange-not-student ignoring him as intently as possible. Even then, Johann’s hand moved blindingly fast, nearly catching Emmet’s as the disk slammed to a sudden stop and he jumped off it.

The white grip was already wrapped around Emmet’s hand and held up. Johann skidded to a stop, two strides away from the black lens level with his chest.

Around them, the light of the walls pulsed gently, a shifting reflection caught in Johann’s unblinking eyes. Emmet’s fingers were at the raised ridge that he was pretty sure was what kicked the handgrip to life. He fought to keep from shaking in response to a sudden squirming sensation. Though the handgrip was cold and hard like metal, he felt it flex as if it was adjusting its shape beneath his fingers.

Johann held his hand out, his own fingers nervelessly steady. I will take that. His voice was very cold.

You think so? Emmet’s eyes were locked tight to Johann, watching for any hint of movement. The light beam that cuts through things. What is it?

It is a light beam which cuts through things, Johann said. Congratulations on being as highly insightful as you are.

I mean how does it work, you mindless moron?

Allow me to give you a very personal demonstration.

Johann moved for Emmet at a speed that eclipsed even how fast he’d moved in the fight at the Manor. Emmet remembered how the paralysis that hit him in the parking lot had come in response to Johann’s touch. It made him squeeze the handgrip faster. With a noon-bright pulse that made him wince, the light blade flared to life, its tip erupting to within a hand’s width of Johann’s chest where he froze.

In Emmet’s hands, the grip buzzed with an intensity he felt as much as heard. The blade was heavy and not heavy all at once, possessing an extra weight that hadn’t been in the grip alone. It shifted as he fought to hold it steady, like he was trying to balance a tube half full of liquid as it gently sloshed.

The ice-blue coldness in Johann’s eyes had gone way beyond rage now. Through his torn shirt, glowing lines traced his stomach and side. It was the same tattoo pattern Emmet had seen a week before, when Johann had broken into Sidnye’s room. That was the day when everything went haywire and had never been put right. The mark was glowing like it had been during the fight, the same ice blue as Johann’s eyes. Around those eyes, his face was the same blank mask as always.

You wanted to kill me. Emmet had to fight to keep his voice steady. In the parking lot. McCune told you to do it.

If to kill you was my intention, I would not need to be told.

Then try it now. See how tough you are without the hardware. The faintest tremor traced through Emmet’s hands, making the tip of the light blade weave an unintentional spiral around Johann’s heart.

If I was to be without the weapon, both arms, and both legs, I would be able only to destroy you less quickly, little boy.

Call me that one more time.

Johann, step back.

It was McCune’s voice, ringing out clear from across the chamber. In the dream, Sidnye felt a sudden urge to wake up twisting through her in response, threatening to disrupt the careful barrier between her thoughts and Emmet’s. She wanted more than anything to see McCune, and to talk to him. She wanted him to explain everything, and to tell her it would be all right. She focused on Emmet’s surprise, though, and on Johann’s eyes still locked to his.

With a slowness that spoke to how much he hated to do it, Johann moved four paces back from Emmet before he stopped. From behind him, McCune stepped into view. He was limping, and pale like he’d just emerged from a couple of weeks indoors. The part of Emmet that remembered McCune nearly falling under the onslaught of the alien monstrosities wanted to ask if he was all right. The part that remembered the look on McCune’s face as he walked away from Emmet on the parking lot made him hold his tongue.

McCune approached to within one step of Emmet before he stopped. Beneath the tatters of his shirt, Emmet saw the same mysterious tattoo-symbol Johann wore, glowing faintly black against his skin. Its tightly woven lines scribed out patterns he had no words to describe, looping around and through each other like Celtic knotwork on steroids.

The device you’re holding is extremely dangerous, Emmet, McCune said. I need you to give it to me.

Emmet didn’t take his eyes from Johann. What is it?

The grip generates a null-space vortex along a variable-order parabolic arc. McCune spoke with an easy familiarity, like he might have been talking about how to wire a surround-sound setup. Whatever the vortex touches, it destroys. Its shape and extent is contained by the field the grip creates. And if you move your fingers the wrong way right now, it could just as easily create a field straight through you as cut its way out through the hull and kill us all.

The tremor in Emmet’s hands kicked up a notch, along with his pulse. Behind McCune, Johann tensed. McCune held him motionless with the faintest movement of his hand.

We’ve had a narrow escape tonight, he said. But you were never in any danger, either from Johann or from me.

Despite all his best efforts, Emmet felt a kind of calm circling beneath the rage. Johann’s expression was one of defeat as he watched Emmet coldly, so that even as his anger faded away, Emmet knew it had done its job.

I’ve never lied to you, Emmet, McCune said. But I was scared for Sidnye tonight, and I let my being scared make you scared. I’m sorry for that. Please give me the weapon.

Emmet released his grip. Another pulse of light flared as the blade disappeared, his hands lurching as the liquid weight went with it. McCune took the handgrip from him.

Johann took a step forward and held his hand out, but McCune hooked the handgrip into his own belt without looking at him. It hung there alongside the one he already wore. Johann hesitated only a moment before he spun away. He hopped to the disk again and shot up toward the floor above. Emmet was pretty sure his speed was a sign of how unhappy he was.

Where is Sidnye? McCune asked.

Down below, Emmet said before Johann had a chance to. She didn’t want to come up.

Are you all right?

Yeah. Emmet tried to say it with a degree of indifference, but in the distraction of seeing McCune wince in pain as he turned to Johann on the floor above, he didn’t know how well he’d pulled it off.

How are we? McCune called.

On course. As Johann circled against the web of light, he called back without looking. Authority systems are warning of damage from our departure. Systems settings are locked down at local stations. On my own, it will take some time to assess.

Emmet’s hurt. Help him first. Emmet glanced up in surprise, seeing McCune look to Johann as he slewed to a stop overhead. A look passed between them, the tension in Johann rising visibly.

What you did tonight was a braver thing than I’ve seen in a long time.

It took a second for Emmet to realize McCune was talking to him again. He had moved to the ladderway entrance from which Emmet and the robot first emerged.

On the parking lot, McCune said. You saved my life.

In the place where she dreamed it all, Sidnye felt her mind grow quiet. She was afraid suddenly, but she didn’t know why.

In Emmet’s mind, she felt him focus on the memory, seeing the freeze-frame images unfold to show McCune falling under the onslaught of the insectoid alien that had clawed its way out of its own smoldering armor. She saw Emmet save McCune’s life when he attacked that nine-foot monstrous red bug, armed only with a hockey stick.

Where all the memories jostled for playback space in his head, Emmet found that one and placed it far, far back in the queue. This was what post-traumatic stress must feel like, he told himself. Yeah, you owe me a stick, he said, wishing almost immediately that he hadn’t. He caught the faint flicker of McCune’s smile before the pain swallowed it again.

I need to see Sidnye, McCune said as he slipped into the ladderway. Then we’ll talk.

Yeah.

With a push into the null-gravity of the shaft, McCune was gone.

When Emmet looked up, Johann was kicking the disk forward again. As he slid along the walls, irregular outlines of light opened up behind him, the shifting mass of color shaping itself into patterns. Like the constellation boundaries on a star map, arbitrary borders came to life as Johann pushed up and flipped again. He sailed down to hop off the disk, two steps from where Emmet stood.

When his hand came up to Emmet’s face without warning, Emmet’s hand came up just as fast, slamming Johann hard in the shoulder. It stopped him, but seemingly more from surprise than any force behind the blow. He glanced down as if Emmet’s touch might have left a mark that only he could see.

You have a lack of self-preservation that astounds, little boy, he said quietly.

Don’t touch me, Emmet hissed. His hands were shaking, clenched to fists at his sides.

I am ordered to help your injuries which requires touching. You wish to suffer without my aid, please do so instead.

As Johann stepped back to the disk, Emmet felt the pain in his jaw flare to sudden life. Whatever cocktail of adrenaline his body had been manufacturing up to that point, all his aches were front and center in his mind again because McCune and Johann talking about him being hurt made it suddenly impossible to ignore them.

Where are we? Emmet said through that pain, but Johann made no sign he was listening. At the midway point of the double-height room, he flipped again, angling the disk as he circled upside down above. It took Emmet a second of watching to realize that the monitors flaring to life behind Johann weren’t mounted into the walls but were actually part of those walls. It was as if the entire room was one huge curved screen, whose light could cut itself into uncountable virtual