15: The Deep Facade

7 Pluvo 712, 5:58 a.m. (XIX)

Jon walked south through the Park, along the path that Varence would take north. When he saw her coming toward him, he stared at her and moved into her way. She recognized him, and her pace faltered, a hand rising to her mouth. He nodded to her, and he subtly extended a hand in which was a folded note. She understood. She resumed her walk, one hand pulling her wheeled trunk, the other open to receive the note. Jon did not look at her as she took it. He continued walking south.

The note instructed Varence to meet Jon at the cafe across from Vivdauro Headquarters at eleven o’clock. Larisa had been imprisoned by the Inquisition, it said, and Jon needed Varence’s help to free her.

* * *

Varence arrived at the cafe just before eleven, winded from having run partway. Jon intercepted her outside the door. He was wearing a backpack, and dark clothes that resembled the habitual attire of Vivdauro employees.

“Yesterday!” Varence said. “It was you!”

“Yes,” Jon replied. “I recognized you from when you came to see me in Nordarosso last year. I need your help, now. I’m sorry, but there’s no time to explain.”

Jon walked away, heading toward the eastmost entrance of Vivdauro Headquarters. He did not look back. He knew from experience that if he looked back, then Varence would hesitate, and then he would have to talk to her, and he would waste fifteen minutes reciting an explanation of why he needed to get inside the Headquarters, and why he needed her help to do it, and then another fifteen minutes coaxing her until she agreed to accompany him. But if he simply walked away, then curiosity would overwhelm her, and she would follow.

Jon strode into the bifurcated antechamber of entrance ten, holding the door for Varence. He did not look at her face, but her footfalls were timid. No matter, as long as she came.

The two guards looked up, annoyed at the unscheduled intrusion. Jon smiled at them. He approached the gap in bars as if to walk through, but just before he crossed the threshold, he suddenly drew a pistol. He fired two shots, one into each guard’s skull. The first guard did not understand what was happening and died with a frown of boredom on his face. The second had time to attempt a shout and died with his mouth open.

Jon turned to Varence. She was frozen in shock, tips of fingers touching lips beneath wide eyes.

“No one heard those shots,” Jon said, loudly over the ringing in their ears. “These entry rooms muffle sound pretty well, and we’re in the one at the end of the line.”

Varence’s eyes moved from the blood pooling on the desks to Jon’s eyes. He gave her a conspiratorial nod: we’re in this together.

“I’m going to use your Serfita employee key,” Jon said, not demanding, but simply stating what was going to happen. On his first attempt at this infiltration, Varence had panicked and tried to run, and he had had to drag her along by force. But he had found that telling her what he was about to do calmed her: his prescient narration made cooperation feel inevitable. “You’re going to give me the key,” he said. “Now.”

Jon held out his hand, and Varence stepped forward, her fearful eyes focussed on his confident ones. She reached into her pink kimono and drew out a metal card on a chain. It was similar to the Vivdauro employee keys, but narrower, and painted with a pattern of dots that the Vivdauro keys did not have. “You can’t use it,” Varence said, lifting the chain over her head and handing it to Jon.

“I can’t” he said. “But we can.”

Jon unslung his backpack and withdrew several lengths of thin steel pipe from it. He screwed these together, and they combined into a rod about six feet long. The end of the last piece was bent into a hook.

“Temporary keys only work if they are activated by one of these machines,” Jon said. He spoke as though lecturing, although he was only guessing, and guessed no more than what he said.

Using the hook, so that none of his body crossed the security threshold, he reached over to one of the guards’ desks and opened a drawer. He could not see the drawer, but he knew where it was, and he used the hook to pull its handle.

“Human bodies emit a unique signal that the security system detects,” he continued. “The keys are calibrated to emit a signal that matches their owner. If the system detects both signals, no alarm.”

Jon slid the hook under a strap attached to a device that he knew to be inside the drawer. He lifted the device clear of the desk and pulled it back to himself.

“Permanent keys like the Vivdauro employees have emit the signal constantly, but with temporary keys, the strength fades, and it has to be renewed, by one of these.”

Jon held up the device. It was a small and nearly featureless metal box with a length of wire protruding from one side. There was a single button on top. Jon knelt and set the device on the floor between himself and Verence. He placed her Serfita key within the coil of wire, then gestured for her to approach. She did — she had been to Vivdauro many times and knew what was expected — and placed her hand within the coil, covering the key.

“But this is my key,” she said, confused.

Jon placed his hand within the coil, covering hers, and pressed the button. He felt an electric tingle. “Now it’s our key,” he said. “I can’t stop the key from emitting your signal, but I can add my signal to it, so the system will see us as one person. Now this key authorizes us to be here.”

Jon took Varence’s hand and led her through the gap in the bars. The alarm did not ring.

He walked backwards to keep eye contact as they moved past the dead guards. When her eyes strayed toward the blood, he said firmly, “You don’t need to look at that,” and she did not look. They walked to the white door that led deeper into the building. Jon released her hand.

“We don’t need to be touching,” Jon said, “but you must stay very close to me from now on. If you leave my side, the alarm will ring, and they will kill us. If you stay close, and do exactly as I say, then everything will be fine. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Jon withdrew a gray robe from his backpack.

“Put this on,” he said, unfolding it and handing it to Varence, “so you’ll look like an employee.” Varence obeyed, dropping her pink kimono and replacing it with the robe. Her hands were shaking; she had trouble tying the sash, so Jon tied it for her. He smiled down at her reassuringly, then opened the white door.

* * *

The first floor of Vivdauro Headquarters was laid out in concentric rings. None of the rooms in the deeper rings had windows, but otherwise they were like the outermost ring that Jon had seen on his first infiltration. The rings were connected in a strange pattern: rather than a single hallway connecting all of them, allowing simple access from the front entrance, the connecting halls were staggered, so that none was visible from any other. The building seemed designed to disorient: its curvature prevented them from seeing where they had come from and where they were going at the same time, the staggered hallways forced a zigzag path that confounded their sense of direction, and there were no useful landmarks to gauge how far they had come.

The ten entrances opened directly into the first ring, so that each faced a wall, and a person entering had to go immediately left or right. Jon led Varence to the right, counterclockwise around the first ring, then turned left into a hallway that connected it to the second. They went clockwise around the second ring until they came to a hallway connecting it to the third and turned right again. Varence knew where they were going — she had been there a dozen times, by her own account — but Jon made sure to stay in front of her. He did not look back, so that she had no opportunity to ask questions or express doubts.

The floor was not slanted, but Jon felt as if he were descending through tunnels. This impression was increased by the Vivdauro employees they passed, who walked rapidly with their heads down, barely glancing at Jon and Varence, like ants scurrying blindly on inscrutable errands.

“When we reach the Ops Center entrance,” Jon said, “there’s going to be a fight. Stay near me, but keep low to the ground, and don’t look at anyone. If you do that, you won’t be hurt. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

After a number of turns that Jon did not count, they came to a white metal door similar to those in the antechambers. The words AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY were stamped into the door in raised letters that were painted black, but it was otherwise unlabeled.

Jon set his backpack down on the floor. He reached into his sash and withdrew a spheroid dam. Varence gasped at the sight of it: “How can you have a dam? There was a prohibition ward at the entrance!”

“Wards can be disabled with magic if you know exactly where they are,” Jon said. “Beyond this door there is a ward that I haven’t been able to locate yet, so…” Jon placed the dam into the backpack, then from the backpack he withdrew a machine gun. The gun had a barrel just long enough to accomodate a forward grip, no stock, and an enormous drum magazine.

Varence opened her mouth to speak, but Jon said, “Earplugs!” and handed her two pieces of wax. “Stay close, and stay low.” He pressed wax into his own ears, then opened the white door and went in. He dropped the backpack just inside the door, and closed it behind him.

The room inside — what Varence had called the “waiting room” — was cavernous. Round and domed, it was the obvious center of the building, the final circle within the rings. The size of the room seemed to be dictated by the geometry of the building rather than by its function: while the room was perhaps fifty yards in diameter (and nearly as tall) there was very little in it. On the wall directly across from the white door was a black door, larger and heavier, secured by two thick iron bars. On either side of this were two long metal desks that merged with the floor. In the center of the room were a dozen padded chairs, arranged in a circle. Besides this furniture, the room was empty. Six guards sat behind the desks, three to a side, and five people sat in the chairs. Two of these people appeared to be Vivdauro employees, but the other three wore clothes of varying colors. One of them was a woman with a wheeled trunk, presumably a Serfita courier.

Jon strode casually toward the desk on the left, keeping the machine gun behind his back. One of the guards looked up at him expectantly. Jon kept eye contact with the guard as he approached, then, when he was near enough to speak, Jon raised the gun and fired a burst into the guard’s chest. Before the man could fall out of his chair, Jon had fired on the other two guards who shared his desk. The gun flashed ten times, two bursts of five. The guards died.

Jon turned and peppered the second desk with bullets. The three guards there had shouldered their weapons and leapt down from their chairs, using the desk as cover. Jon’s shots hit none of them, but they flinched and did not return fire.

Jon grabbed Varence’s hand and pulled her along as he ran to the center of the room. Two of the men there had risen. Jon gunned them down. The other two men and the woman cowered in their chairs. Jon hid behind them. He reached into a pocket and withdrew a small cylinder. He twisted its top and then tossed it underhand so that it arced high and landed behind the desk. It exploded, and the area behind the desk filled with choking smoke. Jon jumped up and moved quickly to the right side of the room, flanking the desk. One of the guards, enveloped in smoke, shot at Jon, but missed. When Jon had an angle to shoot behind the desk, he began firing into the smoke, sending short bursts into it at calculated angles. A few wild shots flew back, but then ceased.

The woman screamed and ran for the white door. Jon shot her, then turned his gun on the two remaining men. Then everyone in the room was dead except for Jon and Varence.

“Why…” Varence mumbled, but she could not complete a sentence. She stared blankly as the corpses, somewhere between horror and denial. Jon pulled her like a tethered lamb back to the white door, where his backpack leaned against the wall.

“Someone did hear those shots,” Jon said, pulling the wax out of his ears. In the floor near the white door were five holes from which bars would rise to seal it if the alarm were triggered. Jon took the sections of pipe that he had used earlier as a hook and dropped them into these holes, so that they stood up and blocked the door from opening. “Other guards will try to open this door in a moment, but they won’t have tools to break through, so this will hold them. I do have tools to break through.”

Jon turned the backpack upside down and dumped the last of its contents onto the floor. Three spheroid dams klunked and rolled. Jon ignored these and picked up the final items the backpack had contained: two coils of stiff black cord.

“They use this stuff in ship construction,” Jon said, pulling Varence back toward the black door. The smoke from his grenade had spread to fill half the room now, thin but still irritating. Varence coughed. “They press two iron plates together and put this on the seam to weld them. But it can also just cut through.”

The black door’s two bars passed through a housing that protruded from the wall on the left. A crank was attached to this housing. It was obvious that turning the crank would remove the bars, but beside it was a row of six rotatable dials with numbers etched on them: a combination lock. The crank would not turn unless the dials were set to the correct positions.

In the previous iteration, Jon had attempted to subvert this lock with magic, but a prohibition ward — hidden, he expected, behind the black door — had discharged his dam. A wound from a bullet that might have hit Varence had appeared in her chest. She had collapsed and died, and the security system had been triggered. The bars on the white door had snapped into place, and then Jon had been trapped in a room with a dozen corpses and no way out. He had fallen back, and this time brought the welding cord.

He wrapped a length of cord around each of the bars, near the crank housing, looping it many times but not overlapping. At the end of each length was a detonator cap. He pressed these, then stepped back as the caps sparked, and then the cord began to burn with an acrid black smoke. It glowed red, then white. When it seemed that the heat’s intensity had peaked and begun to diminish, Jon took one of the fallen guards’ rifles and used it as a club to smash the now-glowing bars. They bent, then gave way, breaking at the point where the heat had weakened them.

“This is the furthest I’ve gotten,” Jon said.

“What do you mean?” Varence coughed, choking on the smoke. Her eyes were read, and tears trickled down her cheeks.

“Never mind,” Jon said. “When you came here before, did a guard dial in the combination for the door?”

“No. Larisa opened it.”

“Do you think the guards knew the combination?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know anything! I don’t know– Why did you kill those people? That woman– She was just a courier!”

“You have to trust me, Varence.”

She looked at him in bewilderment. Then her expression sharpened, and she nodded. Of course she would trust him: there was nothing else for her to do.

Jon waited a minute for the black door to cool. Someone had begun banging on the outside of the white door, trying to open it. Jon ignored this. Wrapping his hands in cloth, he gripped the handle of the black door and pulled it open.

Beyond it was a short, plain hallway leading to an elevator. Jon entered and looked to his left. As he had expected, a crank with a combination lock was there, just like the one outside. A prohibition ward was bolted to the wall above the crank.

“Found you!” Jon said. He smiled.

He jogged back to the white door, where his dams lay on the ground. Varence jogged beside him, her expression vague. He scooped the dams up, then focussed his thoughts on the ward, the position and appearance of which he was now certain. They returned to the black door, walked past the now-disabled ward, and came to the elevator.

“When you went down to Larisa’s office, did you take this elevator?”

“Yes.”

Jon slid the elevator’s grille aside and stepped into the carriage. When Varence had entered as well, he slid the grill closed.

The carriage was small, with only enough space for three or four people to stand comfortably. Rather than the usual lever that would send an elevator up or down, there were two buttons on the wall, both unmarked.

“Push it,” Jon commanded.

Varence reached with an unsteady finger and pressed the lower button. The carriage began to descend.

The ride was surprisingly smooth and surprisingly long. Jon had expected to go down only a few feet, to a basement immediately below the Headquarters’s first floor, but the elevator continued to descend for dozens of feet, and then hundreds. Outside the carriage grille, smooth dark rock moved steadily past.

“Why is it so deep?”

“I don’t know.”

“There must be a natural cave,” Jon muttered. “They wouldn’t go this deep unless there was something already down here.”

Eventually the elevator slowed and stopped. Jon opened the grille to reveal a short hallway that was identical to the one above, except that the black door at its end did not have a visible lock.

“Are there guards outside that door?” Jon asked.

“There weren’t before. It just opens into a hallway.”

“How far to Larisa’s office?”

“Just a few feet. Maybe fifty feet. I never went anywhere except there. That’s all I know. I can’t tell you anything else.”

“Stay close,” Jon said. He moved to the door, turned its handle, and heaved it open.

Beyond was a hallway that looked disappointingly similar to those in the building above. It had the same harsh, downcast lighting, the same dull coppery panelling, and the same ashen carpet. But this hallway was straight, not curved. It ran from the door for perhaps one hundred yards to a fork, where it went out of sight to both left and right. Numerous doors opened on either side, none of them labeled.

In the middle of the hallway, about fifty feet from the door, stood the juggernaut. He was half as wide as the hall, and the top of his helmet nearly touched the ceiling. He was holding an enormous machine gun. An ammunition belt stretched from it to a drum on his back. He leveled the gun’s gaping muzzle at Jon and moved a finger to the trigger.

Varence screamed and hid behind Jon, grabbing his sash and pulling herself against him.

Jon’s hand flew to his dam. He focussed his attention on the gun. It was not a model he was familiar with. Could he make it jam? He could make it miss, certainly, but every shot he manipulated would drain his kao, and the juggernaut had hundreds of rounds. He could teleport himself back toward the elevator and close the door, but Varence was in the way: he might accidentally move himself into the space she was already occupying, and then–

His legs were broken. They did not break; there was no transition: they were broken, and he collapsed. The elevator, Jon thought. The cable might have snapped. It might have fallen… Varence fell on top of him, wailing with horror and pain, and Jon knew that she had suffered the same injury.

A skinny man with loose, dull hair stepped out of a doorway just behind the juggernaut. He was rolling a spheroid dam between the fingers of one hand, as if it were a rubber ball. He wore a black robe with silver fringes. The overt threat from the juggernaut had distracted Jon so that this magician could get a good look at him, and then form an intention that would cripple rather than kill.

Jon channeled kao to heal his legs, but the magician blocked him. Jon searched his surroundings for some means of counterattack, but he knew nothing about this place: any obvious spell would be blocked, and did not have the knowledge to perform any spell that was not obvious.

“Who are you?” the magician asked, stepping forward.

“No one!” Varence screamed. “I’m no one! I don’t know anything! He made me come!”

“I believe you.” The magician gave his dam a little squeeze, and Varence became limp and silent. “But who are you?” he said to Jon.

“I am Johannes de Alder,” Jon answered. He fought to keep his voice steady as pain began boring through his body.

“Alder? The detective?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you here?”

“I’m here to see Livak. He hired me.”

The magician paused, surprised by the use of the swordsman’s name. Then he sneered. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

“Livak is concerned about treachery within your ranks.” Jon tried to sit up, but pain exploded in his groin; his pelvis was fractured. He moaned and flopped on his face.

“There is no treachery in our ranks,” the magician scoffed, dismissing the idea as both stupid and offensive.

Jon gestured toward Varence. “Is she dead?” he asked.

“No. She’s just unconscious, as you will be in a moment. I’ll wake you up when Forloga is here; torture is her department.”

“Forloga? Is that the other magician, the woman?”

The man’s frown told Jon that this guess was correct.

“What’s your name?” Jon asked, allowing the pain to make his voice pleading. “I want to know who’s beaten me.”

“Tretij has beaten you,” the magician answered. Then gesturing to the armored man: “And Volkan.”

Tretij held his dam forward with a theatrical flourish, mocking Jon’s helplessness. He would use the force of the possible elevator crash to render Jon unconscious, just as he had used its force to break Jon’s legs. There was one spell, then, that Jon knew Tretij would not be blocking: the elevator might have fallen all the way from the top of the shaft: it might have shattered every bone in Jon’s body and crushed his skull to splinters. Jon touched his dam and willed himself dead.

7 Pluvo 712, 5:58 a.m. (XXII)

Jon neutralized the hidden ward as he entered the waiting room. He strode confidently toward the black door, making eye contact with several of the guards, but not speaking to any. Varence walked beside him, pulling her wheeled trunk, as he had instructed her. The Serfita courier who was already waiting stared at Varence in confusion, but said nothing.

They walked directly to the black door’s combination lock, and Jon began spinning the dials.

“Are you authorized to go in there?” one of the guards demanded.

Jon looked over his shoulder and smiled at the guard. “Do you know that I’m not authorized?”

The lock clicked as Jon spun the last dial into place, and he started turning the crank, withdrawing the bars so that the door could open.

“But you have to identify yourself! You have to sign in!” the guard said, waving a clipboard.

“Do I?” Jon said cheerfully. He was through the door before the guard could answer. A moment later they were in the elevator, going down.

“The guards don’t know what to do because this has never happened before,” Jon said, narrating for Varence. “What happens when a visitor refuses to identify himself, but he knows the combination, and he isn’t setting off the alarm? There isn’t anything in their manual about that!”

“How do you know the combination?”

Varence was calm. Jon had found that she would accept the murder of the entrance guards if he assured her that it was a singular necessity, and then gave her no time to think about it. “We have no choice but to kill these two,” he had said as they entered the antechamber. “But if we do it, then we won’t have to hurt anyone else.” After it was done, he had said, “That’s over now,” and then instructed her to change into the gray robe while he retrieved the key activation device from the desk. He had kept up a stream of narration about the next steps in the infiltration, ignoring the dead guards, and so she had ignored them too. She seemed to have forgotten them by the time she left the antechamber, and there was no fear in her voice now.

“Someone who works down here told it to me,” Jon answered.

“You’ve been down here before?”

“There has to be more than one way in,” Jon mused, deflecting Varence’s question onto a tangent. “It doesn’t make sense for a place this size to have just one elevator. There’s too much down here. And the guards up top don’t know about the assassins.”

“The assassins?”

“They’re elite guards, but Vivdauro also sends them out to attack targets in the city, so I’m calling them ‘assassins’ for now. There are at least five. The guards up top don’t know about them, which means they must enter and leave by some other entrance.”

“If there’s another entrance, then why…”

“Why the showy security around this one? I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t see why this elevator is here at all. It must have been expensive to build, but it’s too small to be the primary access. So why bother with it? I think maybe it’s just a distraction, to keep people from looking for the other entrance.” He smiled at Varence. “We’re going to find out.”

They reached the bottom of the shaft. Jon opened the carriage grille and then the door at the end of the short hall. They stepped out in the T-shaped hallway.

“There’s a silent alarm that the guards above can press,” Jon said. “It rings down here and alerts the assassins. Right now they’re arguing with themselves about whether or not they should press it.”

“But they won’t press it?”

“No,” Jon lied: he knew that in a few minutes they would press it.

Varence nodded, accepting his assurance.

The hall was empty. Tretij and Volkan, as far as Jon had been able to deduce, were on a yet lower level and would not come up to this one unless an alarm summoned them. When they came, they would not recognize him. Jon was surprised by that, because (unless he prevented it) Volkan would go to the Albrook in less than fifteen hours to abduct him, presumably to bring him back here. Sometime between now and midnight, the assassins would be ordered to attack him… But only if he did not prepare for the attack… Who would give that order? Who was watching him to know whether or not it should be given? Did that watcher know he was here now? Apparently not, but if not, then when did they begin watching? And why?

Jon blinked to clear his thoughts: there was no point in dwelling on questions that would be answered if he simply pressed forward. He grabbed Varence’s hand and hurried down the hall toward the fork at its end.

“That’s Larisa’s office,” Varence said, pointing at one of the doors. “We just passed it.”

“There’s nothing in there,” Jon replied. “There’s nothing in any of these offices. They’re just sets, like a theater. There’s no one sitting at any of the desks. The drawers are full of blank paper. The ledger entries are just scribbles.”

“But I saw other people before, when I went to Larisa’s office. And it was her office. Her name was on the desk, and… and… she had a picture of a hummingbird on the wall.”

They came to the fork. The branch on the right ended almost immediately and was featureless except for a single door at the end. The branch on the left stretched off into the distance. Jon turned left and walked quickly, Varence trailing. The branch was only a hallway for a dozen yards; after that it became a tunnel, the paneling and carpet replaced by bare rock that bore signs of rough tooling.

“I think the offices are literally a set,” Jon said. “They’re only used when Vivdauro wants to show this place to someone, to make it seem normal, like offices are all that’s down here.”

“Are you saying Larisa lied to me?” Varence said, alarmed. She stopped walking, forcing Jon to halt as well. “You said we came here to help Larisa! Why are we down here if–”

“Shh!” Jon placed a finger on her lips. “Just because her office wasn’t real doesn’t mean she was lying about everything. It was still a private place to talk, wasn’t it? Come on. We need to hurry.”

“Why do we need to hurry? You said there wouldn’t be any alarm!”

Jon began walking again. When Varence did not move, he grabbed her arm and pulled her after him. A deep rumbling sound became audible. They passed a pair of iron doors, one on either side of the tunnel, and the sound increased, apparently coming from beyond them.

“What’s making that noise?” Varence asked.

“Steam turbines,” Jon answered. “Dozens of them, in a natural cave. Geothermal. They pump groundwater down through pipes, and steam comes up. The steam spins the turbines, and then electricity goes down through cables. I think the cave is why this place was built here.”

“Why? What do they need the power for? How do you know where the electricity goes? Have you been here before?” Varence’s voice became stressed. The revelation of the offices as a facade had shaken her. “If you’ve been here before, then why do you need me to get in? Why don’t you know where the cables go? Where are we… I don’t want to be here. I want to go back upstairs.”

They came to a cross junction where another tunnel met theirs. Jon turned right, and then left at another junction. There were many doors now, still made of iron, but smaller and lighter than the ones that had concealed the turbines. Most of these doors seemed to lead to empty rooms: some stood ajar, with darkness beyond, and most had scars where placards had been removed.

Jon stopped at a door whose placard remained: OUTPUT 4. A quiet cacophony of clicking and buzzing came from beyond it. Jon turned its handle slowly and eased it open.

The room they entered was large, but seemed small because it was filled with rows of tall, boxy machines. Most of these were inscrutable: masses of snaking wires and humming tubes and clicking gears and popping pistons that seemed almost to writhe with tiny motions, contained within prisms of metal lattice. They radiated heat; despite a vent in the ceiling that noisily sucked air into an unseen space, the room was stiflingly hot.

Near the middle of the room, three men were hunched over a square table that rose out of the floor like a truncated obelisk. A sheet of bright paper covered the tabletop. A machine like a sparse loom darted a shuttle quickly back and forth across the paper. The men had none of the furtive apathy that characterized the Vivdauro employees in the Headquarters above; they watched the tabletop intently, occasionally reaching out and making small adjustments to dials on the sides of the machine. They were clothed in loose robes of coarse, undyed fabric. They wore their hair in sangtus. They reminded Jon of monks, although they were not wearing Pliigist colors or symbols.

At that moment the light above suddenly changed color. In between the white lamps spaced across the ceiling of both the room and tunnel, smaller red lamps illuminated. One of the men looked up and saw Jon and Varence standing in the doorway.

“Sage’s balls!” Jon swore. “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” he shouted at the men, drawing a pistol and brandishing it threateningly. “Don’t run. Don’t fight. Just ignore me. Pretend like I’m not here.”

The men did not ignore him. “Who are you?” one of them asked.

“What is this thing?” Jon demanded, approaching the table. “What’s it doing?”

The men backed away from the table, saying nothing; the two on the sides moved right and left, spreading out, preparing to surround him. Jon noticed, but he did not care: the red lamps meant that the guards upstairs had finally triggered the alarm, and Tretij and Volkan were now looking for him. His time was short.

He stood by the table and looked down. The shuttle, he now saw, was attached to eight wires, which wound round eight spools positioned at the corners and edges of the table. Motors at the bases of the spools turned them rapidly backwards and forwards, pulling the shuttle about over the paper, each spool coordinated with the others so that all of the wires remained taught. The coordinated pulling made the shuttle scurry around the paper like a spider, almost too fast to see. And as it moved, it left a trail of black ink. Not consistently: a dot here, a line there, but the marks were not random: as it moved, it was gradually drawing a picture… a picture of… Jon leaned over it, fascinated. He had never seen anything like this…

Varence screamed, then the scream was cut short. Jon wheeled to look, and he saw that one of the monks had slit her throat with a dagger. She fell.

Without looking to see where the other monks were, Jon dove and rolled between two of the rectangular machines. He felt the breeze of a dagger swinging over him, and he knew he had barely avoided being sliced open by it. He stood and faced the monks. To their credit, they did not rush him en masse. One of them charged him, while another attempted to come in from his left. He quickly shot them both, then wheeled looking for the third. He was gone: he must have run out the door, surely to summon help.

Blood pooled around Varence’s head. She spasmed, then lay still. In the ceiling, violet lamps illuminated next to the red ones: the automated intruder alarm.

Jon holstered his pistol and drew out his tiny suicide gun. He put it to his head and squeezed the trigger carefully, stopping a hair’s breadth from firing. He held the trigger there for one second, two, then tossed the gun on the ground. He thrust his hand into a pocket which held a dam and gripped it tightly, keeping the hand in the pocket.

He moved back to the table and watched the shuttle darting to and fro. It was drawing… It was drawing… Why didn’t it draw faster? Slowly a grid became evident — not a grid, but a network of troughs or channels that was organized on a grid. There were words forming at one edge of the page, numbers… Almost…

Suddenly he was no longer standing by the table. He was across the room, by the door, and Volkan’s armored hand was gripping the back of his neck. The giant pulled him out into the tunnel, where Tretij and several more of the robed monks were standing. Tretij brandished a dam. The monks held short rifles. Volkan lifted Jon with one hand, forcing him to stand on his toes.

Jon sneered defiantly. He squeezed his dam and formed an intention that he had pulled the trigger a hair’s breadth further.

7 Pluvo 712, 5:58 a.m. (XXIV)

“You told that guard that ‘Marek’ said we could come down here,” Varence said as they stepped off the elevator. “Who’s Marek?”

“Marek is a Vivdauro department head who isn’t at work today,” Jon replied. “The guards won’t ring the alarm until they’ve confirmed that Marek did not give us permission to be here, and that will take them all morning.”

Varence nodded, accepting Jon’s mastery of the situation. 

He led her through the black door into the T-shaped hallway and then into one of the unoccupied offices just off it. An empty desk stood in the center of the room. Jon set his backpack down there.

“Put this on,” Jon said, pulling a garment out of the pack.

“But I just put this on,” Varence protested, gesturing to the gray robe that hung loosely from her shoulders.

“That was for upstairs. This is for downstairs.”

A few minutes later, they returned to the hallway, both wearing hooded dun robes. These were not an exact match for the robes the monks wore (like the “assassins,” Jon could think of no better word than “monks” to describe them), but there was no time for tailors: Jon had simply bought the most similar garments he could quickly find. They would pass for monks’ robes at a glance, from a distance, and that was all the disguise Jon needed for the moment. He led Varence to the fork at the end of the hallway, and then, instead of turning left into the long tunnel, he turned right, to the unadorned door that was the only thing on that side. Jon opened the door. Behind it was a stairway, spiraling down out of sight.

“We’re going down there,” Jon said, preempting Varence’s question, “to find out what Vivdauro actually does. The Headquarters” — he pointed at the ceiling — “could have been built anywhere, but this place” — he pointed at the floor — “is here because of a natural cave system, with groundwater, geothermal heat, and space to build secretly. They built this where it needed to be, and then they stuck the headquarters on top, like an ugly hat, and no one up there knows what’s really down here. What does that tell us?”

Varence shook her head, bemused.

“It tells us that the real headquarters is down here. Everything on top is… unimportant.”

“But thousands of people work up there. How could that be unimportant?”

“We’re going to find out,” Jon said, and he led her down.