Wasteland of Flint

Slot Canyon Twelve

With the old Mйxica helping her stand, Gretchen stepped gingerly out of the overhang. The sun had set and the wind had died down, leaving everything quiet and still. Anderssen was vastly relieved to have the world wrapped in darkness. Her head still felt altered, somehow, and she was sure the full light of day would be too much to take. Even the light of the stars — very clear, very bright, with a pellucid crystalline quality — hurt her eyes.

"Careful…there's a cable," Hummingbird pointed. Gretchen stopped, staring at the line of shadow stretching from the ground to the Midge. Something like a white flame winked at the edge of her vision, then brightened. After a moment's attention, she saw the cable itself outlined in pale fire. Gretchen swallowed and looked up.

The ultralight was glowing very softly. Every edge was lit by the same kind of faded, heatless brilliance. Each strut, window, airfoil — all were limned with light. Gretchen's heart skipped a beat, but a sense of delight filled her. There was no fear, only amazement at the glorious sight. She leaned on Hummingbird's shoulder and looked around. Both aircraft were spectral, incandescent ghosts standing out sharp against a limitless black background. The cables made sharp, tight lines to the ground — but the sand, the rock, the cliffs seemed to have disappeared. Only very faint lights winked in deep crevices in the stone.

"The…the Gagarin is glowing," she said softly.

Hummingbird's eyes crinkled up in response. "Yes. I imagine it is."

"What am I seeing?" Gretchen turned to look at the old Mйxica and found him equally illuminated, his kaffiyeh wicking with jewel-colored flames, face blazing with a pearlescent, gold-tinged light. She raised her own hand and saw her palm and fingers glowing in the same way.

"When first you begin to see," Hummingbird said, voice soft against the respirator's background hiss, "you will see too much. In this darkness, you are sensitive to even the least perturbation. By day, you would be almost blinded by the immense detail of the world. Right now, you are aware of the electromagnetic field around living things. The Midge is illuminated because our aircraft carry vibrations from their engines, from the motion of flight, from the powered systems onboard."

"I'm seeing an electromagnetic field?" Gretchen started to laugh. "That's impossible!"

"You see the light from a glowbean or a wand, don't you? This is the same, only much much fainter." Hummingbird took hold of her shoulders and turned her toward the open plain. "The 'helper' I gave you has broken down a barrier in your mind, a perceptual filter to which you've become accustomed since you were born. Look out there, into the emptiness. What do you see?"

"Nothing…wait, there's a faint radiance along the dune faces."

"Heat is radiating from the earth. Soon it will be gone and the sand and air will be the same temperature. Then there will be no difference for you to perceive."

Gretchen gave the old Mйxica a sick look. "Is this what you see? All the time?"

Hummingbird shook his head. "No. A student on the path must overcome many obstacles — this is the obstacle of clarity. I fear…" His voice changed timbre and Gretchen was aware of a change in the glow outlining his face. "The drug you took is one given to students who have been training and preparing themselves for months. But we have no time to guide your feet along the traditional path — "

"You're not supposed to be training me at all!" Gretchen interjected suddenly. Memories flooded back and she remembered the strange conversation in darkness. "I heard voices arguing as I slept — 'only men may become tlamatinime.' Women must become…" She paused, trying to remember. The memories were fading, scattering like pine needles in a fall wind. "Skirt-of-knives said…she said…ah, it'sgone."

Hummingbird had become quite still, his gaze fixed on Gretchen's face. "You heard a woman's voice? An old woman?"

"No — she was young — but there was an old man, he sounded like a stage actor."

The nauallis made a queer barking sound, which Gretchen remembered was what passed for laughter for the old man. "She was young long ago. But I was thinking of that day while you slept." He sighed, an honest sound of regret. Then he began to sing, but only for a moment. "We leave the flowers, the songs, the earth. Truly, we go, truly we part."

"You were there." Gretchen knew the truth of the matter even as she spoke. "You were in the room, a young man. The old actor was sitting in a wooden chair. He stood up to leave."

"Yes. And he was right — he is right — and I've broken an ancient law, speaking to you as I've done, giving you the 'helper', setting your feet on this path."

"I am in danger?"

"You've always been in danger," Hummingbird said in a sharp tone. "But now, today, you must learn to see again."

"I think," Gretchen said, "I see too much!"

Hummingbird nodded. "Yes — listen closely, there is not much night left. Your mind has been forced awake by the 'helper.' A veil of perception has been cast aside, letting you see as a human organism naturally perceives the world. Your mind is now exposed to a flood of data — a flood which in normal course is filtered, flattened, reduced to aggregates and symbols — but your consciousness is not ready to operate in such an environment.

"Now you must learn to concentrate on the important. You must learn to see selectively."

Gretchen felt itchy all over and shook her arms and hands. The z-suit felt strangely tight. "Didn't I see before? I mean — you're saying this sharpness, with everything seeming in focus all at once, even things far away — is what happens anyway?"

"Even so." Hummingbird raised his hand in front of her face. "But your mind was hiding the true world from your consciousness. Look at my hand tonight and you see every single bump and groove in my glove, you see the fire of my bodily electrical field, you see each pore in my skin. But yesterday? Yesterday you saw an idea of a gloved hand. An abstraction. A great part of human mental activity is devoted to reducing this raw flood of images and smells and sensations to remembered symbols. A hand. A man. A dog. An ultralight."

He swung his hand, indicating everything within sight. "Those symbols are not real, but they are very convenient. They let the lazy mind operate in such a confusing world." Gretchen could hear a grin in the man's voice. "Have you seen a baby watching the world? Their eyes are so wide! Their entire mentation is focused upon trying to understand everything all at once. A baby becomes a child and then an adult by replacing raw truth with layers of abstraction. By learning speech. By learning to read and to write. All those tools — the tools which build Imperial society and our science and our technology — hide the true world behind symbols."

"I…I understand." Gretchen felt faint and swayed. Clumsily, she sat down on the sand. The sensation of touching the earth, the sound of sand shifting under her hands, was nearly overwhelming. "What do I do…to be able to, say, move around?"

"Your body can handle everything," Hummingbird said wryly. "If you let it remember. Come, stand up. Let's go for a walk."

Nearly an hour later, Gretchen climbed gingerly across a slab of wind-polished stone and came to a halt, staring down into a wide bowl-shaped depression. To her right, a black lightless cliff rose up into the night. The bowl below her was strangely smooth.

"Where are we?" Anderssen slid down a splintered section of rock and came to a halt a handspan from the surface of the bowl. "This is hard-packed dust," she said, looking up at Hummingbird, who crouched atop the slab. "Not even sand."

The old Mйxica pointed to the cliff. Gretchen turned and saw — suddenly, as if the opening had materialized from the rock in her single moment of inattention — a door. She stiffened, feeling the freezing cold keenly through the insulated layers of her z-suit.

"This is where Russovsky found the cylinder." Hummingbird spoke very softly, though the trapezoidal opening in the cliff-face was entirely dark and still. "Do you see anything?"

Gretchen felt the cold settle into her bones and the pit of her stomach. Learning how to walk again had been easy — just a matter of keeping her mind occupied elsewhere. The body remembered how to breathe, how to walk, how to keep its balance — as long as the mind didn't try to interfere. Talking to Hummingbird about nothing of any importance had let her mind settle and regain its footing in simple physicality. The encompassing darkness restricted her vision to faint thready ghosts of heat and electricity. In time even they seemed to dim and fade as she got used to them. The nauallis claimed she could focus now, once her mind adapted, to bring clarity to bear on a single object.

"Go on," he said, remaining atop the slab. "Let yourself see."

Gretchen sucked on her water tube, eyes closed, feeling her heartbeat speed up. Then she opened her eyes again and looked at the doorway.

"Nothing unusual," she said after a moment. "Worked stone. I don't see any lights inside. Should I?"

"I don't know." Hummingbird made his way down into the bowl. "I came here last night and watched for a time. There were no lights, no blue glow. But I feel uneasy. Everything here is so old…worn down by time. Such places are dangerous, being all of a single cloth. Differences," he said, "are easier to perceive."

"Are we going to go in?" Gretchen still felt cold and a nagging thought was beginning to curdle in the back of her thoughts.

"Yes." Hummingbird looked to her and then back to the doorway. "We have to see if Russovsky left anything behind in there."

Gretchen put a hand on his shoulder as the Mйxica moved to cross the bowl. "This is probably where she was replaced," she whispered, holding him back. "Her flight log shows she headed straight back to the observatory camp from here."

"I know." Hummingbird's hand clasped hers for a moment, fire mingling with fire. "This would mean her remains are within. And those we must destroy."

"Do you still have your little pistol?" Gretchen was digging in her tool belt.

Hummingbird nodded, patting his side. "It's not much use for eliminating evidence."

"Or for dealing with Ephesian lifeforms." Gretchen produced a compact lightwand. She adjusted a thumb control. "This is set to high UV," she said, handing over the lamp. "Everything else seems susceptible; maybe whatever is in there will be too."

The nauallis took the lamp with a shake of his head. "If there's something in there which can duplicate a human being almost to the cellular level, I fear it won't be affected by this."

"Then we need something bigger," Gretchen said, kneeling on the sand. Busy hands detached a variety of tools from her belt and began assembling them. Without looking up, she said: "Bandao-tzin felt he couldn't let me leave his company without proper equipment, so he sent this with me."

She held up a short-barreled, stockless gun with a hand grip and a fat magazine. Hummingbird grunted in appreciation and held out his hand.

"I don't think so," Gretchen said tartly, tucking the assault rifle under her arm. "You're going in first and I'll cover you."

"What does it shoot?" Hummingbird's appreciative smile vanished. He was eyeing the rifle warily now. "It looks like something the Marines would use."

Gretchen shook her head with a smirk. "No — it's Swedish. A Bofors Sif-52 shockgun. Throws explosive flechettes in a room-sized cloud." She locked the magazine back into place. A green light gleamed at the back of the weapon. "So I'll probably wait until you're out of the way."

"Of course." The nauallis did not seem convinced, but he turned away and glided across the hard-packed dust towards the door. Gretchen scuttled along behind him, keeping to his right, the gun leveled on the opening. When he'd reached the edge of the door, she stopped, steadying herself. The barrel of the weapon was a distraction — flickering with curlicues of orange flame — and she concentrated, remembering only smooth, dark solid metal.

Hey, she thought as Hummingbird stepped around the corner into the opening, it works!

The rifle was solid again, barrel heavy and entirely lacking in radiant light.

Gretchen scampered up to the door and peered inside. Hummingbird had tuned the lightwand down low, but the flare of ultraviolet made the chamber entirely visible once Anderssen's goggles kicked in. She saw a large, rocky space with a rumpled, irregular floor. The far wall was not that of a cave, however, but worked stone — much like the frame of the opening she was crouched against — holding a second trapezoidal door.

There was nothing in the chamber save Hummingbird, who was crouched only a meter or two away, the lightwand held out at a stiff angle. Gretchen scanned the rest of the room over the sights of her shockgun, then fixed her attention on the dark space within the second door. There's something odd about all this…she started to think and then her mind sort of froze up like a water pipe caught in the first chill snap of winter in the high timber. Oh, blessed mother! O divine sister of Tepeyac! Unaware of the fear choking the words in Gretchen's throat, Hummingbird advanced into the chamber, keeping to the left-hand wall. He led with the wand, now burning purplish-blue in high UV setting, and crouched against the flat, smooth wall on the opposite side. Something had caught his eye and the nauallis leaned close to examine some kind of a spot on the wall.

"Hu–Hu–" Gretchen couldn't make her voice work, the word coming out a choked squeak. Though gripped by a terrible desire to flee, Anderssen crept inside, shoulder to the right-hand wall as she scuttled towards him. "Hummingbird!"

"Look at this," the nauallis said calmly, pointing with the wand at a smudge on the smooth stone. "Remains of a glowbean, I think. Russovsky must have…What is it?"

Gretchen was clutching his arm, the rasp of her breathing loud in her ears. "Look at the floor, at the doorways," she hissed, pointing with the barrel of the Sif. "They're level."

Hummingbird nodded, though he tensed as well. "And so?"

"This is a First Sun building," Gretchen said in a tight, controlled voice. "This postdates the release of the eaters, the destruction of the surface, the rise of the Escarpment, everything. Your valkar made this place."

There was a hiss-hiss on the comm circuit. "I don't think so," Hummingbird said after a pause. "Look at this wall. This is not worked stone, not planed or cut or burned with a tunneller. The doorways are the same."

Gretchen peered at the wall, finding concentration and focus elusive amid the rampage of adrenaline coursing through her. "I…I suppose…" Then something odd about the surface caught her attention and she dialed up the magnification on her goggles. "Hmm. That's very strange — this surface is solid."

"Yes." Hummingbird moved along the wall to the inner doorway. Cautiously, he looked around the corner, then drew back. "Almost perfect, I would hazard."

Keeping the muzzle of the Sif pointed away from the Mйxica, Gretchen sidled up to join him. "Real stone isn't so smooth," she muttered under her breath, suspiciously checking the exit to the canyon. "It's usually porous, even a fine marble or granite. Filled with minute hollows, concavities…"

"True." Hummingbird looked around the corner again, leading with his lightwand. "But this is not stone as you think of stone. This is a wall assembled an atom at a time over a million years. Almost perfectly solid and more than a meter deep." He slipped into a corridor with walls slanting inward to a flat ceiling over a dusty floor.

Gretchen darted across the opening and swung the Sif to cover the passage. The tunnel reached back to end in an angled wall. Hummingbird moved carefully, one gloved hand pressed against the slanting wall.

"Watch out for this floor," he said, voice a low buzz in her earbug. "Like the walls, it is dangerously slick. There is very little traction."

Gretchen looked down at the dusty surface. A mirror image of her cloak, mask and rebreather stared back through a gray film. "Okay," she said, testing the surface with her boot. Sliding her foot from side to side elicited a queasy feeling like slipping on new ice. Pressing directly down seemed to gain some purchase. Ahead of her, Hummingbird was moving very slowly, taking his time and placing each foot with careful precision. Gretchen followed with equal care, keeping to the opposite wall.

The sloped passage turned to enter a second chamber at an angle. Hummingbird paused just outside the junction, risking a quick look inside before beckoning for Anderssen to join him. Gretchen moved gingerly to his side — her boots kept wanting to slip out from under her — hands grimly tight on the handle and stock of the Sif.

This room seemed to have no ceiling — or none she could see — and three smooth walls. The fourth, opposite them, was rough and unfinished. Gretchen's mouth tightened, making out irregular markings on the wall — inset spirals, whorls of raised, grooved rock — and she hissed in warning. At the base of the wall were scattered a number of cylinders.

"There." She pointed, indicating a section of bare stone which had been broken open. Hand-sized rocks lay in an untidy pile at the foot of the wall. Boot prints scuffed an ancient layer of dust. "Russovsky took the embedded cylinder away."

Without waiting for Hummingbird to respond, overcome by her own curiosity, Gretchen walked stiffly across the floor to the nearest cylinder. The artifact seemed much the same as the one Clarkson had cut open on the ship — a third of a meter long, four or five centimeters across — and the exterior was encrusted with the same kind of lime-scaling. Very gently, Anderssen nudged the device with the muzzle of the Sif, making the thing skitter across the impeccably smooth floor. The cylinder did not burst open.

She could feel Hummingbird's tension from the doorway, but Gretchen ignored him for the moment, moving to the cavity broken in the stone. Up close, she saw the wall was raw irregular rock, rising up through the floor at an angle and vanishing into impenetrable darkness overhead. The entire surface was crowded with fossils — more of the anemonelike structures, the fluted curl of something like a snail, serrated ridges indicating a swimmer with multiple spines. A flattened, bifurcated cone. Scorch-marks surrounded the ragged opening where small blasting charges had been used to split open the limestone.

"What made this place?" Gretchen whispered into her throat mike as she leaned close to examine the surface of the ancient sediment. She could see hundreds of specimens within arm's reach — a glorious view into a lost, dead world. "Did something survive after the valkar fled into hiding?"

"Ghosts." Hummingbird hesitated, remaining crouched in the entranceway. "You've seen what lived — the microflora — but they did not make this shrine. This is memory made solid."

"How?" Anderssen backed away from the wall, swinging the gun to cover the rest of the room. "You mean like Russovsky?"

Hummingbird waved for her to get behind him once she reached the archway. "I have not seen this before myself," he said in a low voice, "but the pyramid contains references to such things. The valkar is dreaming, but it is not powerless. A subtle influence extends throughout this world, power seeping from the hidden heart. Even when the crust was shattered and remade, not all memories of what lived here before died." He began to back up into the hallway. Nervous, Gretchen followed.

A white frost began to form on her breather mask, which was worrying. The night air of Ephesus was far below freezing, but the respirator should be trapping the water vapor in her breath. Only CO₂ should be escaping. "Crow, something's happening…it's getting very, very cold."

Hummingbird turned up the intensity of his wand and raised the light high. Shadows fled away down the passage.

"There's something here," the nauallis hissed in alarm, staring intently around at the glassy walls. Gretchen tried to hurry, but the glassy floor immediately betrayed her. One foot flew out and she crashed down hard on her right hip. A gasp of pain burst from her throat. The barrel of the Sif banged on the floor and the weapon flew from her fingers. The nauallis flinched, but kept up his steady, careful pace toward the outer room.

"Anderssen, quit playing about and get up," he hissed.

Gretchen tried to rise, but her hands slipped on the mirrored floor and she spun helplessly. One boot hit the wall and skittered away. Even as she groped for some kind of purchase, she saw a spreading reflection of grayish light spill across the slanted wall. The butt of the Sif hit her head. Gretchen twisted into a roll and flopped over onto her stomach. Grasping fingers closed around the weapon and her boot struck the wall square enough to stop abruptly. She looked up.

Hummingbird had backed past her in his flat-footed crouch. The little gun was pointing into the strange gray light, absurdly dwarfed by the bulk of his gloved hands. Gretchen twisted her head around and her eyes went wide. Reflex twitched the Sif into aiming position.

The passage was filling with a steady gray radiance. An indeterminate crepuscular color shone from the air. The doorway to the room of the sea had vanished in the endlessly repeating reflections of the mirrored walls, floor and ceiling. Where the gray existed, there was nothing else — no shadow, no stone, no edges or divisions. Gretchen realized, with a chill start, the light was moving rapidly toward her, spilling along the passage in a colorless tide.

"That's not light," she shouted into the comm, trying to scrabble backwards along the mirror-bright floor. The lead edge of the radiance was almost touching her flailing boots. Her finger twitched on the firing bead of the Sif. "It's something else!"

Hummingbird's answer was drowned out by a sharp blast. The shockgun rocked against her shoulder as a canister burst from the muzzle. Gretchen oofed and the recoil flung her down the hallway, legs and arms windmilling. She slammed into Hummingbird and they both flew back through the slanted doorway into the outer chamber. Behind them, a high-pitched z-z-zing ended in a blast of flame and light. Out of the corner of her eye Gretchen caught sight of the gray radiance rippling and twisting like a torn blanket in the strobe-light eruption of a hundred and sixteen individually packaged munitions.

In a cloud of dust, Anderssen untangled herself from the nauallis, hands working the reloading mechanism. Gretchen felt the heavy, solid thunk of a new canister levering into the firing chamber. Hummingbird scrambled up from the spreading dust as well, half-blinded by his disordered kaffiyeh.

"Clever," he barked sarcastically over a comm channel hissing with static and the same kind of high warbling wail Gretchen had heard in the cave on Mount Prion. "You must have done well in physics… Ai! Run!"

Gretchen was still raising the shockgun to cover the tunnel entrance when the nauallis bolted for the archway leading into the canyon. A shout of dismay strangled in her throat as the radiance boiled out of the passage. She caught a brief, fragmentary glimpse of a cloud of rock chips, bits of metal and what seemed to be frozen flame suspended within the advancing gray.

"Crap!" Gretchen sprinted for the doorway and leaped through the opening, hands protecting her head. The roar of static in her earbug was deafening and she slapped the comm off. Both feet hit the dust, sending up twin plumes of heavy yellow. Staggering, Gretchen ran across the bowl and scrambled up the tilted slab on the far side.

In the darkness, she lost sight of Hummingbird among a jerking, disorienting blur of canyon walls and sandy cavities among glassy-smooth boulders. Damning his cowardly name, she slid across another slab and dropped down onto a wide, gravel-strewn moraine. Wheezing for breath, Gretchen jogged up the slope and at the top she turned, nervous hands checking her belt, the sling of the shockgun, her rebreather — all the tools she needed to survive. A cough died in her throat.

The radiance had spilled out into the canyon bottom. Now, from a distance, the thing looked nothing like any light or illumination she'd ever seen. Strikingly, there were no shadows or reflections cast by the color. Instead, the already dark canyon dimmed as the shape grew among the boulders and flooded from the doorway. Gretchen adjusted her goggles, but there was no change save in infrared, where she hissed in surprise to see the edges of the formless gray merging with the subzero night while bright points of heat blazed in the center of the mass. But even those sparks were dying as she watched.

"Oh, no," she whispered, backing up. The Sif was in her hands again, but Anderssen realized with a grim certainty the gun was useless. The fading heat sources were the still-exploding flechettes she'd fired into the color, being avidly consumed by this…this…"What is this thing? Hummingbird!"

There was no answer on the dead comm. Gretchen turned and ran as fast as she dared, scrambling past rounded anthracite boulders and slogging through deep drifts of sand and dust. A hundred heartbeats passed and suddenly, as she dodged between two menhirlike stones, a pair of powerful hands seized Gretchen and swung her aside, into a pocket of shadow in the greater darkness. She yelped, swinging the stock of the Sif around in a sharp blow to the unseen figure's head. The honeycombed plastic thudded into something solid. A glowbean flared to life and Gretchen found herself facing a wincing Hummingbird.

"Where…" Anderssen tried turning her comm back on. "…have you been? What is that thing in the canyon?"

"A hungry dream," Hummingbird said, though the staccato warble and keening in the background of the channel nearly drowned him out. "Or rather, what a current at the edge of the valkar's dream made in this waking world."

"A dream?" Gretchen fought against a fierce desire to smash the butt of the shockgun repeatedly into the man's face until he made sense. "Dreams don't have form, idiot bird! They don't eat up explosive munitions like toasted maize and come looking for more!"

Hummingbird pushed the muzzle of the Sif away from his face with a fingertip. "Even dreaming, the valkar distorts the world with the weight of its presence. Even these dead stones retain some memory of a once-living world." He slapped a gloved hand against the glossy obsidian rising up above them. "Nothing survived the devastation intact. But you saw the effect Russovsky's stone had on the organism in the cave — even the pattern memory of an often-used artifact could stir the formless to take shape. This world is rife with parched, formless memories."

Hummingbird stopped, tensing. Gretchen turned, hefting the Sif onto her shoulder, muzzle down. Gun useless, she thought with very faint amusement. Make a note for Bandao. Good for feeding colorless light.

"I was very foolish to come here — Hsst! Something is coming."

Outside their tiny shelter, the gloom in the canyon — barely disturbed by the thin ribbon of brilliant, unwinking stars high above — deepened. Gretchen fought down a desire to bolt from their meager shelter. Hummingbird's fist closed on her shoulder in painful counterpoint to the static roaring in her earbug.

The color was there suddenly, gliding out from behind a house-sized boulder. Again the gray radiance did not extend beyond an indistinct, wavering shape. Gretchen's eyes widened, taking in a burning-hot point drifting within something like a bifurcated cone with a forest of tentacular legs moving restlessly beneath. She focused her goggles on the hot centerpoint and saw a flechette tumbling in place, hissing and spitting slow fire. The metallic sheathing was rapidly disintegrating. Apparently unaware of them, the color drifted past, a gray cutout against a flat velvet background.

Hummingbird's fingers clasped her wrist and the comm channel fell silent. He leaned close, pressing his mask against hers. "We have to get away from here or we'll be fuel too."

Nodding, Gretchen peered out around the corner, saw nothing — no wavering, indeterminate blotches of lightless color — and slipped out, weaving her way through the debris scattered at the mouth of the canyon. Hummingbird was right behind her.

Heedless of what might see them — if the color had eyes or something passing for an organ of sight — they ran up the broad, open slope flanking the entrance to the slot. Anderssen immediately started wheezing again. Her leg muscles sparked with pain and she nearly collapsed at the top of the ridge. Hummingbird caught her arm, dragging Gretchen to her feet.

"Run," he barked, voice a barely audible squeak in the thin air. "Don't — "

Gretchen looked back, trying to catch her breath.

Amorphous gray shapes were emerging from the mouth of the canyon. Not all were cone-shaped — some shifted and distorted in the brief moment of her glance — and others strode swiftly on long, stalklike legs. A sensation of hostile desire struck Gretchen like a physical blow, though at such a distance there should have been no way for her to ascertain expression or intent.

She turned and ran, head down, forcing cramping legs and thighs to bound across rocky, uneven ground. Hummingbird loped at her side, keeping pace, though Gretchen guessed the old man could easily leave her behind.

They were within sight of the cave — she could see both ultralights outlined by a soft glow against the night — when a gray shape raced past on dozens of insectile legs and spun to face them. Hummingbird drew up as Gretchen stumbled to a halt, surrounded by a drifting cloud of dust and gasping for air. She looked around only seconds later and the radiance was all around them in shimmering, pearlescent sheets. A trickle of cold pure fear in the back of her throat made Gretchen's teeth clench.

Hummingbird settled back on his heels, shifting his weight on the ground. Out of the corner of her eye, Gretchen was suddenly struck by a sense of his calm solidity. Does anything disturb him? she wondered wildly, fighting to keep from swinging the useless gun toward the enemy. The sight of the terrible gray hanging in the air made her feel weak and small and powerless. Is he ever afraid?

"Tla xihualhuian," his voice echoed over the comm, woven into a rising and falling storm of static and queer shrieking wails. The nauallis's hand extended, clenched tight into a fist. Grains of newly-crushed powder dribbled into the dark air. "Tlazohpilli, Centeotl! Ticcehuiz cozauhqui yollohtli. Quizaz xoxouhqui tlahuelli, cozauhqui tlahuelli!"

The Mйxica's voice grew stronger with each syllable. Gretchen's distracted comprehension slid away from the barely-understandable words. They were in a strange, archaic-sounding dialect — she recognized a few of the words — yellow and green and wrath.

"Do not move," Hummingbird said, the sound of the chant still ringing in his voice. "Become still."

Gretchen stared at him in horror. The nauallis was settling to his knees, back straight and shoulders square. Around them, the belt of the gray was advancing through the air like ink spilled into clear water. The bright points of heat were gone. In infrared the malicious cloud had faded almost to invisibility. Her heart hammering, Gretchen forced incredulous words between clenched teeth.

"Are you insane? They're going to drink us up like a sponge! Get up!"

"No." Hummingbird placed his hands on both knees, eyes invisible in shadow, his face a faintly gleaming mask of dim fire. "Let them come…"

"Never," Gretchen snarled, swinging away from the old man. Before he could react, she sprinted away, aiming for a space where the drifting radiance seemed thinnest. At the same time, her finger squeezed the firing bead on the Sif and there was a tinny crack as another flechette cylinder accelerated down the fat barrel and soared away into the night sky.

Anderssen tried to leap the curdling indistinct color but failed, plowing through a thin drifting sheet. Immediately, she felt a chill, numbing shock. Gretchen staggered, nearly twisting her ankle on a hidden rock, then caught herself and fled. Gray clung to her legs and torso like the shredded remains of a gauze quilt or a thin paper banner. Against her black cloak and z-suit, the color shimmered pale and lifeless — fish scale without rainbows, a dead iridescence — but did not fall away as she ran. Cold blossomed in her side, cutting through the layers of insulation and radiation shielding built into the suit.

Off in the distance, the canister blew apart, filling the night with a bright, sharp blossom of red and orange. Hundreds of tiny explosions followed, the paltry air robbing their roar and clamor of its full-bodied rage. A twisting cloud of sand and grit billowed up into the black sky, lit from below by the fading reflection of the explosions.

Gretchen managed another twenty strides and then collapsed with a thin, despairing cry. A cloud of the omnipresent dust puffed up around her. Color dripped from her legs and stomach like fresh steam rising from a still-unfrozen lake in a high country winter. Muscles spasmed, clenching tight within her skin. Blinded by needlelike pain, Gretchen tried to force her legs and arms to move, but wave after wave of nervefire crushed her down into the sand and gravel again.

Hummingbird remained sitting amid the writhing circle of gray, eyes closed, his heartbeat steady as a temple bell calling the faithful to prayer. The color drew closer, puddling and seeping across the ground, still shadowless, emitting no light save the heatless glare of its own substance. Gray washed across his knees, his hands, up his arms. The nauallis's body shivered slightly, then grew still as the colorless tide mounted to cover his broad chest and then his face.

Choking, her mouth coppery with blood, Gretchen felt sweat freezing on her clammy skin beneath the tight grip of the z-suit. The dreadful color was pooling around her, covering her arms and torso, blotting out her sight of the sky. A single jewel-bright star gleamed for a moment amid the gray before being swallowed up.

Oh blessed sister, what do I do? Gretchen felt her body slow, leached of warmth, robbed by creeping, icy fingers. Her heart was still racing wildly and panic threatened to drown her mind as her body was being smothered by the color clouding around her. Stupid old man! We shouldn't have gone down there…

Then, across a sputtering flood of near-comprehensible static and the tinny warbling of countless invisible birds, she heard the nauallis singing in his deep, slow voice.

"Nic-quix-tiz," the words came, somehow clear and distinct amid all the noise and fury rolling around her, "nic-toh-tocaz nit-lama-caz-qui nina-hual-tecuti. Niquit-tiz tlama-caz-qui, pat-tecatl, tollo-cuepac-tzin."

This time they did not sound so strange, so foreign to the Nбhuatl Gretchen had spoken since she was a young girl, laboring over her alphabets and word lists in a low-slung white-painted school perched amid spruce and realfir on the ridge above Kinlochewe. The pacing and tone of the words were not the quick modern dialect, but something older and more resonant. A language which was complete unto itself, not crowded with Norman and Japanese loan words, where the sound of the old names was proper and correct. Temachticauh instead of sensei for teacher. Totoltetl instead of tamago for egg.

"I banish wrath," Hummigbird sang. "I pursue fear. I am the priest, the nauallis-lord. Let wrath, let fear consume me, the priest."

The suddenly understandable words tumbled through her consciousness and just as swiftly fled, but the clarity and conviction in the old Mйxica's voice settled into her bones like the warmth of a mulled draught. He is not afraid, he is not afraid. The thought spun around Gretchen and she fell still and quiet on the ground. He is still alive.

Though her heart was hammering hard enough to bring a spark of pain in her chest and cold sweat purled behind her ears, Gretchen surrendered, trusting to the steady voice ringing through the encompassing gray. Her fists relaxed and she let the gray enter her. I am not afraid, she thought as a rasping tumult of static swelled loud, roaring in her ears. I am not afraid.

There was a moment of wailing sound and a rush of prickling chill. Gretchen felt her body convulse, though she felt the sensation at an odd distance, and the gray radiance faded away. The sky was revealed once more, though the stars were now twinkling and shining, no longer hard, bright points. Hot wind brushed across her face, carrying a humid, decaying smell and the chattering angry cry of something crashing among the trees. Palmate fronds — serrated with slender triangular leaves — obscured most of the sky. Gretchen could hear the sea — surf booming against a shallow shore — not far away.

I am not afraid, she repeated to herself, sure that death was closing about her in a cold, implacable grip.

The sensation of lying in a muddy stream under a hot, tropical sky faded away by degrees. In some indefinable time, the vision became a memory — sharp and distinct, as if such a thing had happened to her only the day before — lodged among thoughts of Magdalena and remembrances of school and travel and her children throwing snowballs in the meadow behind the big barn. Gretchen realized her eyes were still open and the vault of stars above was cold and still again.

Tentatively, she tried to raise her head. Nothing happened. Slowly, the sky brightened and obscured. Gretchen tried to focus, to bring forth the clarity Hummingbird had promised her, but as she did the colorless gray returned, damping out the stars and the night sky. In the formless void, shapes and phantasms flickered — emerging from nothing, nearly reaching definable shapes or scenes — then vanishing again. Everything was so indistinct, so faint, her mind failed to grasp reason or purpose among the shifting gleams and tremors.

These are hungry memories, Gretchen heard Hummingbird say, his voice a weak thread amid the roiling nothingness. They seek shape and purpose.

I can be formless, Anderssen realized, and I will not die.

She let go, letting herself — sore muscles, bruised ribs and weary mind — fall into stillness.

Once more the gray faded away, leaving only crystalline night. Gretchen had a sensation of floating upon a limpid, dark lake without a visible shore. The water was heavy, holding her up, her body freed from the tyranny of gravity, in some balance where the rubbery tension of the lake surface could hold her weight. She could not see the lake — only the constant, unwinking stars — but was certain of its presence. All sense of frigid cold and weariness were absent. Even her thoughts — which had begun to feel attenuated, drained, parched by the relentless events of the day — were at peace. They did not hurry, but moved languidly, finding their own proper pace and rhythm.

I am finally still, she realized. This is what Hummingbird meant.

The nightmares and frantic memories of the gray seemed far away, reduced to insignificance. Gretchen perceived — as though she stood on a great height and stared down, finding a tiny dark speck in a field of gravel beneath a looming cliff of basalt — her body was alone in the darkness. There were no furious, malefic clouds of not-color swirling around her, no half-seen shapes drawn from the ruins of an ancient world, only stone and crumbled shale and dust.

Am I really alone? she wondered, though the thought had no urgency. Was the gray merely hallucination? A phantom drawn up into a bewildered, confused mind?

Something moved — a human shape — and entered her field of view. Gretchen felt the lake tremble and shift, unseen waves rolling her up and down. Gently, with no more than the sensation of sand and grit pressing into her back, she found herself on the shore of a vast, dry ocean. The figure — cloaked and hooded, z- suit half-visible in the pale starlight — leaned over her, one hand resting on a padded knee. The thin aerial of a comm pack arced up against the stars.

Was the gray only something I saw in a moment of clarity? The thought struck her hard, rousing a placid mind to hurried thought. Certainty gathered beneath her breastbone, solid and unmistakable. Like the glow around the ultralights? Around the cable? The witch-fire of the dunes shedding their day-heat into the implacable night?

"Hello." Gretchen's voice felt rusty, deep and scratchy, as though she'd woken from a long, deep sleep. "Give me a hand, huh?"

A glove clasped hers, drawing Gretchen to her feet. The motion roused to life all of her aches and hurts, drawing a hiss of pain and a wry grimace. The figure's kaffiyeh fell aside, revealing battered, scored goggles and a rust-etched rebreather. Anderssen squinted, surprised. Hummingbird's equipment isn't so badly used… She stopped, frankly goggling, eyes widening in surprise.

A woman stared back at her from the depths of the hood, brushstroke-pale eyebrows narrowed over half-seen pale blue eyes. Gretchen felt calm flee, brushed aside by a shock of realization and confusion.

"Doctor Russovsky?" she managed to choke out.