“Ah, my ‘blood’ being my information.”
“Yep.” He had to really put his shoulder into shoving the heavy door open. I probably should have helped him. It was solid stone. And when it opened, warm air wafted out like the breath of a beast.
“They made these structures like apocalyptic fortresses in case there’s ever an anti-aejej outage,” he said.
I blinked, stepping in after him. “Oh goodness! Has that ever happened here?”
Inside the concrete hut was more concrete, except for the tree-trunk thick steel pole that ran through and out and up into the sky. It was surrounded by a chunky concrete spiral stair case.
“Yes, some years ago. I wasn’t here for it, thank goodness. There was some sort of breach. To this day no one knows who or what it was. I’ll always suspect Ultimate Corp because the Hour Glass had ended its business in this region not long before.”
“You mean The Reckoning? The outage happened right after that happened?”
He nodded.
“So what happened when the anti-aejej went off?”
He chuckled as we ascended the staircase. “What do you think? Deadly chaos. Thankfully there was about a minute warning, so most could get their asses inside, or switch on their own personal antis, but my God, so many were lost to the winds that day. Men, women, children. It’s the risk we all take living here.”
I followed him closely as we went up the stairs. “A risk worth taking?”
“Definitely.”
I gasped when I entered the room that was the small top floor of the hut. “But on the outside this place is . . .” I sighed and just stared. It wasn’t even like looking through windows. It was as if we’d stepped outside. I could see across the city, I could look up into the darkening turbulent sky. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re looking at screens,” he said.
I stepped up to what looked like the edge of the roof. My feet touched a barrier, but my eyes couldn’t tell that it was a screen. I reached out and pressed my fingertips to it. It was warm.
“And only the inside of this power hut has all these crazy screens It’s the Hour Glass’s main hub,” he said. “I not only built this, I run it. With a team, of course.”
“Really?”
“Yes. My skills have improved since we last talked.”
“Did you build the programming that resets and protects the Hour Glass, too?”
“Hell no,” he said, laughing hard. “That was built by Maiduguri, the low level AI who still runs this place. Maiduguri was created by one of the first groups to come here.” He sat on the well-worn couch in the center of the room. “Sit, AO.”
I walked around the room first. Touching the screen, marveling at its realism up close, thinking and ignoring the pounding in my ears and neck. In the back of my mind, I could see the pomegranate of eyes. This room was live with wifi. I sat beside him, staring at the pigeon sitting on the edge of the hut. So wildlife, at least the kind often referred to as “rats with wings,” lived in the Hour Glass, too. Had they been introduced here, or were they, too, refugees?
“What?”
He looked at me, and I looked at his face up close. I’d analyzed every detail of this face years ago when I couldn’t move, when I was in so much pain, when I didn’t know what I was or could be. His full lips with the delicate crease in the middle, his high cheekbones that showed off the power of his bloodline, and the brown spot in the white of his left eye, all had given me comfort. He looked the same, just older and more him.
“What did they do to you?” he asked.
I smiled and shook my head. “I did this to me,” I said. “It was all my choice.”
“Being born crippled and then being mangled by a damn car?”
“The part after all that,” I snapped.
“You have a twisted idea of what choice is,” he said. “My choice was dropping my whole life to be king of some small kingdom or being disowned.”
I wiped my face with my hands and groaned. I knew what he was asking. “I don’t know, Force.”
“Well, tell me about it, then.”
“I just said I don’t know.”
“You know. I know you.”
“You don’t know me anymore,” I said.
“Men attacked you in your local market while you were shopping and you killed them all with your bare hands in front of thirty-one people. Oh I definitely still know you.”
“I don’t know exactly what happened,” I said. “I’m not a murderer. Those men would have killed me.”