Chapter 7 — The Generator

"A robot arena?" Chrys said. "You're in a funny mood."

"Beep bop," Will said. "Break a leg."

Possibly a rib.

He suppressed the laugh and walked toward Alvis, who was still adjusting something in his own chest cavity with his head tilted to one side, the way a mechanic looks at an engine that hasn't quite explained itself yet. The android looked up.

"Chrys. Long time."

Alvis cracked his own neck. The sound it made had no business existing.

"What have you done to yourself," Chrys said.

"Jokes on you," Alvis said — the laugh not unhinged exactly, but comfortable with its own unhinged quality. "I have no money." A large laser cannon extended from his forearm and began firing without much preamble.

Chrys didn't move.

The shots hit him and had no effect.

"ESAD?" Alvis said.

"Precisely." Chrys ran. He covered the distance and threw a haymaker. Alvis ducked under it and repaid him with a clean punch to the liver. Chrys felt it. Something locked. "Can't move the hand," Alvis said, and swept his legs.

He went down. Alvis on top of him. He got free. They both stood, and Alvis looked at his hand, which was now held by a magnet from Chrys's belt.

"ESAD and a magnet. Both still unstable. One-time use." Chrys looked at him. "The power source is the problem."

"You sneaky thing." Alvis laughed, properly this time. They shook hands, the grip precise, calibrated, the grip of something that had learned handshakes from watching them rather than having them. "Well. I suppose this is goodbye."

"Goodbye, old friend." He held him by the shoulders for a moment. He'd been in the Tesseract for a year. Alvis had been the only company for most of it. "You were very good at this."

"I know," Alvis said.

He came apart. Not suddenly — gradually, the way things that have been holding together for a long time finally stop. Crimson, then nothing.

"Time," Will said. "Say your goodbyes. Outside errands." The arena dissolved. Dark again.

Chrys opened the portal and went through.

Midnight. After Marcus's dinner, which had been quiet and warm and the kind of meal that happens when a group of people has been together long enough to know what everyone needs without being told.

Everyone else was asleep. Or Chrys assumed they were asleep. He'd stopped being certain of things like that.

The lab was quiet except for the coughing.

He'd been ignoring the coughing for three weeks. He looked at the handkerchief in his hand, which was not something you could ignore once you were looking at it, and then he put it away.

"Chrys?"

"Will."

"Thank you. I know the version of me you're thanking wouldn't remember. But it was still me." The avatar manifested at the edge of the workspace — the one that looked almost exactly like him, younger, charcoal hair the way it was before the liquid accident, the same gray eyes. Chrys's had something the avatar's didn't. He couldn't have said what. "Why are you troubled?"

"Without this dimension the training stops. We don't have another source." The screwdriver fell from his hand. He left it. "Time matters here. More than it matters out there. And I'm running out of it."

"Better than dying in a week," the avatar said, shoulders moving in a small shrug. "You knew the consequences when you started this. You made the calculation." A small glass bottle, green, appeared in his hand. "Have this."

Chrys drank it. Felt the burn of whatever it was. Not unpleasant. Sharp, then warm, then nothing. "What would I do without you."

"Something less efficient."

"There's something you forgot," Chrys said.

"There's something you forgot."

"What."

"The Lost Boys." The avatar pressed his palm against his face. "Still in there. From the fight. Four years ago. If you extract them, it buys you another six months at minimum."

Chrys sat very still.

"So it really did happen." He smiled slowly, the way he smiled at things that confirmed a hypothesis he hadn't wanted to commit to. "Extract them."

"One percent failure rate. Think explosion, not implosion."

"I understand." He looked up. "The timeline — if it's separate in there, they could have spent infinite time in the Tesseract."

"Or zero, if they ended up in mid-tesseract."

"Either way." He was already concentrating. The red dot appeared in his palm, dark and growing. "Either way, we find out."

"Boom," the avatar said.

The quiet zap came from near the showers.

The generator.

"Get out." Chrys was already moving. He grabbed the avatar's arm — which was warm, which was always slightly uncanny — and they ran. Out of the showers, up the hill, into open air, and behind them a sound like a door slamming in a room with nothing else in it.

"Extinguish protocol," he said.

"Already running. It's not enough." A pause. "I've alerted everyone. Thirty seconds."

He was on his feet. Something had hit him on the way out, a branch or the edge of the housing, he wasn't sure — and his head was bleeding from somewhere at the temple. He pressed his sleeve to it and looked at the fire.

It was eating the generator.

The generator was the power source for the lower Tesseract connections, the ones that ran the training systems, the ones that would take six months to replace. He watched it burn the way you watch something be destroyed that you know you cannot stop.

"Friends out of the house," he said. "All of them."

"Already on it."

"Good."

"Reinforcement called."

"What reinforcement–"

"No need," said a voice he didn't recognize. Not Will. Not anyone. A whisper, right next to him, breath without weight. A strong wind moved through the grove, moving through the leaves and the flames simultaneously, and the fire went quiet.

He turned toward the sound. Nothing. Light footsteps moving away from him in the direction he couldn't see.

"Good morning, Mister Sandy."

Aurora Henderson came from the east path. Yellow eyes. She moved through the grove the way someone moves through a place they have a specific claim on, which she did.

"I apologize," Chrys said. "The generator–"

"Keep your hands away from this place." Her voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. "Don't come back."

A strong wind lifted all of them — all eight of them, Eon too, she counted precisely — and set them down on the paved bridge at the eastern edge of the grove. The shield rose from the ground with a heavy thud and sealed behind them.

He laughed, quietly, into his sleeve. He couldn't help it. He'd known her for years and she still surprised him.

"You checked everything to an electron," Marcus said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "It was probably a bear."

"Possibly."

They stood on the bridge. The shield behind them, the plateau ahead, the dark pre-dawn sky above. Eon was slightly apart from the group, looking back at the shield. He'd been in the Tesseract. He'd come out to this.

Sam looked at him. "Who are you?"

"Lost Boys," he said. "I want to apologize. For the raid."

"Four years ago?" Marcus said. "You made us stronger." He reached out and pulled the boy into a hug that produced a loud cracking sound. "You alright?"

"Yeah." Eon blinked. Something in his face rearranged itself. "Can I join you?"

Marcus looked at him. The expression he wore when he'd already decided and was taking a moment to let the other person arrive.

"Get over here," he said.

They rode the bovirlias across the red desert in the early afternoon, when the heat made the air thick and the shadows under the rocks were the darkest shadows on the plateau.

Bovirlias were enormous things. Lazy by disposition, hovering on four small round inflators, propelled through their thorax holes by the wind they caught and redirected. They didn't particularly want passengers. They tolerated passengers the way large creatures tolerate small ones, without hostility, without acknowledgment, as though the arrangement was beneath comment.

Unless you touched the antenna.

Chrys had discovered this. One light touch on the right antenna caused the creature to inhale enormously and launch forward at a speed that left approximately no time to prepare. He'd discovered it by accident, which was the best way to discover things about large animals.

He touched the antenna.

The world became very fast.

Sam had the Sage73 half-raised before he was already a dot on the horizon. She watched the dot. It kept getting smaller. The desert was very large. The bovirlia apparently had a position it was trying to reach and wasn't particular about whether its passenger was ready.

"Should I–" she said.

"I think they're coming back," Eevi said.

The dot reappeared. Getting bigger. The bovirlia cresting something over the red scrubland, and behind it, a wave of sand. Caramel-colored, building fast, getting tall. It caught them both and the dot disappeared.

The wave settled. A hill of sand where they'd been.

Marcus was already running.

"Quicksand!" Eon shouted — too late.

The hill was moving wrong. Shifting, sinking — the inconsistency of ground that has decided to stop being ground. Marcus reached the edge of it and his legs went in to the knee before he understood what was happening, and then he understood, and stopped struggling, which was the correct thing to do in quicksand and the wrong thing to do in every instinct he had.

He pushed with his arms. Sank faster.

Down to the thigh. He swung the axe, knotted the rope to the handle, buried the blade in dry ground four feet away and pulled. The legs were coming up, slowly, fighting it, and then something else pulled back. Something under the sand that had arms, or something like arms, something that gripped.

He looked down.

The sand was moving in the wrong direction around his legs. Not sinking. Pulled.

"See you in a bit," he said.

The force took him.

His axe followed him under.

The sand settled.

Sam stood at the edge of the quicksand with the Sage73 raised and nothing to shoot at.

"Marcus," she said. To the sand.

No answer.

She looked at Eevi. Eevi was already scanning — she was already reading the geometry of it.

"The thing under the sand," Eevi said.

"Yes."

"It's not random."

"I know."

The plateau was quiet. The sand was still.

Distant. But there.

Sam looked at Eevi. Eevi was already moving toward the edge.

"He landed," Eevi said.

Sam holstered the Sage73. She looked at the sand. She looked at everyone.

Nobody argued. Nobody waited to be told.

One by one, they stepped in.