Glory Season (66 page)

If anyone else ever came this way since the tunnel collapsed, they’d have left traces here, as we’re doing. All those others who tried to get past the door … and we’re the first to make it!

Or, the first since whatever calamity had caused the avalanche. Whether that had been natural or artificial remained to be seen.

At last the two young vars broke through, sliding downslope into what seemed a rubble-strewn basement. What might have once been crushed barrels lay in rusty heaps along the walls. The only exit was a half-ruined iron
staircase, missing many risers, which appeared to have slumped from an encounter with high temperatures. It was climbable … with great care. Helping each other to the topmost landing, Brod and Maia turned the handle of a simple metal door. Together, they pushed hard to force the warped hinges, and finally squeezed anxiously into a hallway twice as wide as the earlier one.

Terrible heat must have passed through the zone nearest the tortured cellar, once upon a time. Several more metal doorways were fused shut, while at others, Maia and Brod glanced into chambers choked with boulders. No hint remained of whatever purpose they had served, long ago. Even the sturdy tunnel walls bore stigmata where plaster had briefly gone molten and flowed before congealing in runny layers. The sight reminded the two summerlings of their awful dehydration.

Limping beyond the affected area, they soon traversed the most pristine and majestic stretch of corridor yet, which coursed beneath lofty arched ceilings, higher than any Maia had ever seen. Her shoulders tightened and her eyes wanted to dart in all directions at once. She kept expecting to hear footsteps and shouting voices … or at least mysterious whispers. But the place had been emptied even of ghosts.

As on Grimké, there were signs of orderly withdrawal. Most of the rooms they peered into were stripped of furnishings.
This whole corner of the island must be honeycombed
, she thought. At the same time, Maia recalled her promise to Brod—that getting through the mystery gate might offer their key to continued survival. So far, this was all very grand and imposing, but not too useful for keeping them alive.

Maybe some future explorer will find our bones
, she contemplated, grimly.
And wonder what our story was.

Then, Brod cried out, “Hurrah!” Accelerating, he hobbled ahead, leading Maia to a room he had spied. Lights
flickered on as he rushed inside, limping toward a tiled basin while murmuring, “Oh, Lord, let it work!”

As if answering his prayer, a bright metal faucet began spilling forth clear liquid—fresh water, Maia scented quickly. Brod thrust his head under the stream, earnestly slurping, making Maia almost faint with sudden thirst. In ravenous haste she bumped her head against a porcelain bowl next to his, slaking her parched throat in a taste finer than plundered Lamatian wine, slurping as if the flow might cut off at any moment.

Finally, dazed, bloated, and gasping for breath, they turned to peruse this strange, imposing room.

“Do you think it’s an infirmary? Or some sort of factory?” Maia asked. She cautiously approached one of several broad, tiled cubicles, each with a glass door that gaped ajar. “What are all these nozzles for?”

Leaning inside to look at a dozen ceramic orifices, she yelped when they suddenly came alive, jetting fierce sprays of scorching steam. “Ow, ow!” Maia cried, leaping back and waving a reddened arm. “It’s a machine for stripping paint!”

Brod shook his head. “I know it seems absurd, Maia, but this place can only be—”

“Never!”

“It is. That really is a shower stall.”

“For searing hair off lugars?” She found it doubtful. “Were the ancients giants, to need all that room? Did they have skins of leather?”

Brod chewed his lip. Experimentally, he leaned against the doorjamb and began inserting his arm. “Those little, thumb-size windows—I saw a few in the oldest building of Kanto Library, back in the city. They sense when someone’s near. That’s how the faucets knew to turn on for us.”

More steam jetted forth, which Brod carefully avoided as he waved in front of one sensor, then another. Quickly,
the stream transformed from hot to icy cold. “There you are, Maia. Just what we needed. All the comforts of home.”

Maybe your home
, she thought, recalling her last, tepid shower in Grange Head, carefully rationed from clay pipes and a narrow tin sprinkler head. At the time, she had thought it salaciously luxurious. Back in Port Sanger, Lamatia Hold had been proud of its modern plumbing. But
this
place, with its gleaming surfaces, bright lights, and odd smells, was downright alarming. Even Brod, who had grown up in aristocratic surroundings on Landing Continent, claimed never to have imagined such expanses of mirrored glass and ceramic, all apparently designed to service simple bodily needs.

“Laddies first,” Maia told her friend, citing tradition and motioning for him to go ahead of her. “Guest-man gets first privileges.”

Brod dissented. “Uh, we’re in a sanctuary—or what must’ve been one, long ago—so strictly speaking, you’re the guest. Go on, Maia. I’ll see if I can find something to patch my feet.”

Maia frowned at being outmaneuvered, but there was no point in further argument. They both badly needed to clean their many wounds, lest infection set in. Later, they could worry other matters, such as how to feed themselves.

“Well, stay in shouting range, will you?” she asked, tentatively moving her hand toward the controls. “Just in case I get into trouble.”

Maia soon learned the knack of waving before those dark circles in the wall. She adjusted the shower to a temperature between tepid and scalding, and texture between mist and needle spray. Then, on stepping under the multiple jets, she forgot everything in a roar of bodily sensations.

Everything save one triumphant thought.

Those cheating murderers and their guns … they think
I’m dead. Even Leie probably does. But I’m not. Brod and I are far from it.

In fact, she was sure none of her enemies had ever experienced anything remotely like what she luxuriated in now. Even when it came time to scrub and pry embedded grains of sand out of her wounds, that stinging seemed no great price to pay.

Sitting before a mirror broad enough for dozens, Maia touched her unkempt locks, which for weeks had grown out tangled, filthy, uncombed. It was, indeed, free of the dye her sister had hastily applied while Maia squirmed, helplessly bound and gagged aboard the Reckless.
I ought to hack it all off
, she decided.

Brod sang while finishing his shower. His voice seemed to be cracking less, or perhaps it was the astonishing resonance lent by that tiled compartment—no doubt a wonder of technology, designed into the cleaning chamber for some mysterious purpose lost to time. Nearby, on the countertop, Maia saw the bloody needle and thread the boy had used to stitch his worst gashes. Maia had not heard him cry out even once.

The little medical kit he had found behind one of the mirrors was woefully ill-equipped. A good thing, since that had made it small enough to overlook under wadded trash when this place was evacuated. There had been a few sealed bandages, which hissed and gave off a funny, emphatically
neutral
smell on unwrapping, plus a tiny bottle of still-pungent disinfectant, which they decided to leave alone. And finally a pair of scissors, which Maia lifted after all other matters had been attended to, taking a few tentative, uncertain swipes at her hair. There had been nothing else useful to find amid the litter.

Behind her, the clamor of water cut off, and the same nozzles could be heard pouring hot air over her companion’s
body. Brod whooped, as noisy in pleasure as he had been stoical in pain. “Hey, Maia! Why not use this machine to do our clothes, too! Clean and dry in five minutes. Toss me yours.”

She bent to pick up her filthy tunic and breeches between a thumb and forefinger, and threw them in his direction. “All right,” she said. “You’ve convinced me. Men are good for something, after all.”

Brod laughed. “Try me out next springtime!” he shouted over the renewed roar of jetting steam. “If you wanna see what a man’s good for.”

“Talk, talk!” she answered. “Lysos shoulda cut all the talk-talk genes off the Y chromosome, an’ put in more action!”

It was the sort of easy repartee she had envied of Naroin and the men and women sailors, devoid of real threat, but carrying a patina of stylish daring. Maia grinned, and her smile transformed her appearance in the mirror. She sat up straight, using her fingers as combs and shaking her trimmed bangs.
That’s better
, she thought.
Now I wouldn’t scare a three-year-old on the street.

Not that her scars were shameful in the least, but Maia felt glad that most of the knocking around had spared her face. A face that was, nevertheless, transformed by recent months. Some adolescent roundness still hemmed the cheekbones, and her complexion was clear and flushed from scrubbing. Nevertheless, privation and struggle had sculpted a new firmness of outline. It was a different visage than she remembered back when sharing a dim table mirror with her twin, in a shabby attic room full of unrealistic dreams.

“Here they are,” Brod announced, putting two folded garments on the counter next to her. Like Maia herself, the clothes looked and smelled transformed, though badly in need of mending. The same held for Brod, Maia thought, upon turning around. The young man shrugged into his
own shirt and trousers, grinning as he poked fingers through long gashes. “We’ll take along some thread, and maybe sew ’em later. I say we move on now, though. Who knows? We may strike it lucky and find someone’s apartment, with a full wardrobe.”

“Plus three bowls of porridge to swipe, and three beds to sleep on?” Maia yawned as she stood, stealing one last glance at the mirror.

I used to see Leie—whenever I looked at my reflection—as well as myself. But this person before me is unique. There is nothing else like her in the world.

Strangely, Maia found no disappointment in that notion. None at all.

Clean and partially rested, they resumed exploring and soon found themselves traversing another zone of ruin, where powerful upheavals had wracked every plastered wall. In places, damage had been rudely patched, while elsewhere, lesions exposed bare, cracked stone. Maia and Brod stepped carefully where the floor canted or faulting had riven a corridor in two. Some of this harm might have come from age—the natural action of millennia since this refuge was evacuated. But to Maia another hypothesis seemed more likely. Blows from space, the marks of which still scarred Jellicoe and other isles, must have come near to toppling even these mighty halls.

Grimké was just an outpost
, she realized.
This must have been a main fortress.

Maia and Brod soon found that not everything had been taken away when the inhabitants were banished. They came upon a region packed full of complex machinery, room after oversized room, stuffed with devices. Some clearly dealt with electricity—distant relatives of the useful little transformers and generators she knew—but on a magnitude vastly greater than anything used in today’s
Stratoin economy. The scale of things staggered her. There was more metal here than existed in all Port Sanger! Nor was it probable she and Brod had more than scratched the surface.

One chamber stretched a hundred meters across, and seemed to climb at least three times that height. Almost filling the entire space towered one massive block consisting of an amber, translucent material she had never seen before, braced by heavy armatures of the same adamant, blood-red metal that had made up the puzzle door. Dim flickerings within the outlandish gemstone told that its powers were quiescent, but hardly dead. It made them both want to creep away on tiptoe, lest the slightest noise waken whatever slept there.

The sanctuary-fort seemed endless. Maia wondered if their doom would be to wander forever like damned spirits, seeking a way out of a purgatory they had striven so hard to enter. Then the corridor spilled onto a broader one, with walls more heavily reinforced than ever. To their left stood another massive, crimson-metal door, this one almost a meter thick and resting on tremendous hinges. It gaped
open.
On this side, someone had set up a wooden easel, bearing a placard on which were printed bold, unfriendly letters.

YOU WERE WARNED KEEP OUT!

So anomalous was the message, so out of the blue, that Maia could only think, in response,
Don’t speak nonsense. Whoever you are, you never warned us of a thing.

As if we care.

“Do you think the reavers left it?” Brod asked. Maia shrugged. “It’s hardly like them to admonish. Scream ‘n’ leap, that’s more their style.” She bent toward the lettering, which looked professionally done.

“It must be an important room,” Brod said. “Come on. Maybe we’ll learn something.”

Following close behind, Maia considered.
If it’s so important, why do they use signs? Why didn’t they just close and lock the door?

The answer was obvious.
Whoever they are, they can’t close the door. If they do, they’ll never get it open again. They don’t know the combination!

The long, tubelike chamber spanned forty meters, lined all the way with adamant red-metal and triple-braced buttresses. Presumably to resist even a direct hit … though a hit of
what
Maia still couldn’t imagine. She did recognize computer consoles, many times larger than the little comm units manufactured and distributed by Caria City, but clearly relatives. It all had the look of having been used just yesterday, instead of over a thousand years ago. In her mind’s eye, she saw ghostly operators working at the stations, speaking in hushed, anxious voices, unleashing horrific forces at a button’s touch.

“Maia, look at this!”

She turned around. Brod was standing before another placard.

Property of the Reigning Council If you are here, you risk summary execution for trespass.

Your entry was noted. Your sole option is to call Planetary Equilibrium Authority at once.