So Nona stayed.
“Don’t say things that are questions but aren’t said like a question,” she said eventually, letting her voice rush out without thinking about it. “Take it away. Take it. We don’t need it. If you ask more questions—I’ll want to answer them— Take it away, I said.”
Paul considered this. “Okay.”
Pyrrha said, “Wait. Hang on—” but Paul had already obeyed. Nona felt it, the pop. The grey flapped and peeled away from the windscreen—pale light poppled in, and the whole windshield exploded into vision.
Before them was water, and the megatruck drove along its surface. There was limitless nothing above its surface—something that wanted to look like a night sky, maybe, or a purpling storm with winking lights like stars or lightning—and it stretched without relief over and above that water. Dirty gouts of foam were being spun up by the megatruck’s tires and undercarriage as it sped along, on top of the water, and that obscured the space and the water and everything, until Nona heaved herself forward on the wheel and spun it hand over hand. It was good to let her hands do things: they knew how to do things she did not know how to do. That raised a huge cloud of foam; the megatruck lurched to one side, and everyone was holding on to things, and everything that hadn’t been secured tumbled to the other side of the cabin. Yells echoed softly through the door behind them. Paul, light on Cam’s feet, reached forward over Nona’s shoulder and the windscreen wipers started a huge SCREE … SCREE … SCREE across the windshield.
Pyrrha said, “This is impossible. We should be flayed alive,” and Paul said, “Yeah.”
Nona tried to explain.
“The water doesn’t want to touch us, that’s all.”
Crown was saying urgently, “Judith—stop, come back,” and Nona vaguely heard unbuckling; and then shadows fell over her, people standing behind her seat. Lots of people had crowded around behind her now; Nona wasn’t sure she liked it.
Pyrrha sucked in her breath, and she said: “What the fuck is that?”
“Told you so,” said Kiriona Gaia.
As the megatruck spun around, the wide rippling grey waters resolved into something totally different. There was a big structure standing up out of the River—that water was the River, after all—a tall, cold cylinder of what was unmistakably stone. The waters parted around it, and each bulgy wave slammed into it as though trying to bring it down, but it was as hard and inexorable and real as the water and the skies seemed faint and fantastic. Nona thought it looked like something out of a picture book, and held on to that thought, that middle-of-the-brain thought. There was a thought above and below that knew what it was, but the moment she looked at either thought she’d lose the game.
The Captain’s voice was like old teeth. “He left them too long—you left them too long, my salt thing.”
“You are here,” said Nona, finding talking was hard, that her voice sounded drowsy in her own ears. “Okay, good—the water really won’t touch us. I was worried about our back end.”
Paul and Pyrrha flinched hard away from that voice—dived to the other side of the cabin, wheeling away as though struck. This meant that there wasn’t a foot on the accelerator, and Nona had to slither down in her chair until she was pretty well staring at the top of the windshield just to keep the megatruck going. A recorded voice said, “Auto-acceleration enabled,” and a little bell made a nice little tinkle, so she slithered back up and left it.
The tower was so big—as the megatruck approached she began to realise how big, as big and as broad and as tall as any crane or building in the city—stretching higher than their Building at home, even. There was a clear mark where the water reached up it, where the stone was wet black rather than the dry-stone grey above. From inside the megatruck, she could not see how high up it went.
For some reason this tower scared Nona’s top and bottom thoughts so terribly that her heart went ker-CHUNK in her chest—there was a terrible pain in her side and all the way down her arm. The pain was good, because she couldn’t think about anything but the pain. The more she thought, the more problems she had.
“The hole,” said the Captain, “the hole in the road, the hole, the hole, the hole.”
Crown was saying something, scrabbling against the back of Nona’s chair, scrabbling. Pyrrha and Paul were collapsed on the floor. Nona knew that skidding across the surface of the water was no good, so she looked for one of the big, cresting waves, and with the auto-accelerator dinging in her ears, she ploughed the megatruck directly into the water.