“Sedate him. Whatever you need to do,” Elvi said. And then, “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” Jim asked, but she didn’t answer.
She didn’t know she was leaving until she was already gone. She pulled herself hand over hand through the hallways like a nightmare of being trapped in a sunken cave. She was going faster than she could handle, bruising herself as she crashed around corners. Her mind was divided between a deep animal panic and something smaller, calmer, and more watchful.
The catalyst chamber was as full as it ever got. Fayez and two techs floated beside the catalyst. The catalyst’s empty eyes were vague and unsurprised, her hair floating around her like a drowned woman. Xan and Cara were visible on a screen in the isolation chamber, their small bodies filling the space within it.
“Elvi?” Fayez said. “What’s the matter?”
She didn’t answer him. Jim slid in through the door behind her. She ignored him too.
The isolation chamber was one of the most advanced devices Laconia had ever fashioned, but it was as easy to use as a meat freezer. Elvi grabbed the handle, braced, and pulled the thick door open. Cara and Xan turned to her, their eyes wide with confusion and alarm.
“Get out,” Elvi said. “Out of the container. Do it now.”
Fayez was at her side. She was afraid he was going to grab her, stop her, slow her down and make her explain herself. He didn’t.
“The dive went bad,” Elvi said. “Amos is stuck there, and we can’t get him back.”
Xan shook his head. “I don’t understand. You can’t get him back? Stuck how? What stuck him there?”
Cara’s smile was triumphant. She took her brother’s hand. “It’s all right. We can do this. Follow me.”
Her eyes closed, and then a heartbeat later, Xan’s closed too. The catalyst cooed softly and mindlessly. Elvi’s breath shuddered and her hands trembled. It occurred to her exactly how bad this moment would be for a medical emergency of her own. Fayez put a hand on her shoulder, and she let herself be turned. He was frowning with worry. Maybe fear.
“Hey, Elvi,” he said.
“Fayez.”
“So. I guess we’ll call this field-testing a new protocol?”
To her surprise, Elvi laughed, even if it came out like a sob. Cara shifted like someone twitching in her sleep. A connection request came through on the ship’s system: Harshaan Lee looking for her. She answered, but didn’t give him time to speak.
“What are we seeing?”
“The subject appears to be stabilizing,” Lee said. “However, I am seeing—”
Before the next word came, Elvi’s awareness widened like its jaw had unhinged, and she exploded into white.
Interlude: The Dreamers
The dreamer dreams, and his dream is unlike all that passed before. Where grandmother masks whispered and promised and told their secrets, nothing welcomes him here. Instead, there is the machine, and the machine is constant motion. Something that isn’t light glimmers in colors no eyes have seen. Shapes lock together and come apart too quickly for a mind to follow. The chitter of a swarm, rich with meaning he cannot find. The dreamer looks upon the truth behind the dream and finds no place for himself.
But a place must be found or made, so the dreamer imagines himself closer, wills himself in, and the machine bites at him, rips him, skins him skinless and raw. The pain is real, but it teaches. The glimmers glint patterns in their not-lights, the cascade of shapes has music in it, the swarm song is a static of words at the edge of comprehension. If there is less of the dreamer than there was, if the machine has taken what can’t be given back, the reward is a knowing deeper than bones.
The next time comes, and the dreamer fits his bleeding hands in the spaces between the spaces, breathes through the holes in number, and builds from abstraction a tool to crack wide the abstract. He sees the mechanism through its own strange eyes, and its depth astonishes and terrifies him. The voice of the machine grows deep and grand and horrifying: God whispering the obscenity that ends worlds. The darkness is the darkness of old, but terror has no face for him, and there needs to be a way, so there will be. A thousand bites, a million needle sticks, a ripping away of all that doesn’t fit.
And the bull-headed god turns to him, and for an instant that is an eon, they know each other with intimacy beyond names. There are no secrets between the two men dead without dying—their pain is one pain, their weariness is one weariness, their resolves braid together to a single rope that pulls at them both ways. Something shatters, and the horned god with his bloodied flanks turns eyes to the dreamer. Wheels within wheels within wheels. Where there was once a man, pitiless legions march.