Penult (44 page)

But there was to be nothing of the
sort. I slept the sleep of a stone. And my dreams were merely
dreams. Apparently the Singularity had enough of me for one
day.

Still, I could sense its presence
hovering all around my consciousness. I was more attuned to its
presence now, or at least no longer tuning it out, the way people
with tinnitus or who live next to a freeway learn to do to keep
from going insane.

I could never feel truly isolated or
alone again knowing that a superhighway of consciousness surged all
around me, only a mood swing away.

***

I slept early and I slept long. In the
morning, I awoke to a veritable crowd of guests. A honeybee sat on
my windowsill eager to share its fresh cargo of purple nectar and
yellow pollen. Meanwhile, Olivier and Urszula sat on my stone bench
snacking on the bowl of manna chips intended for my breakfast. I
salvaged a few before they were gone. They might look like peeled
off scabs, but they tasted wonderful, sort of like a cross between
fruit leather and beef jerky.

Urszula had encased herself in full
Duster battle gear, with clinging scale-like armor and a peaked
helmet. Olivier had washed his thinning hair and put on a
neatly-woven Hawaiian shirt, khakis and flip-flops—not exactly the
attire of a warrior.

“
Are we … we’re not raiding
Penult today are we?”

“
No. Not today,” said
Urszula. “Yaqob is not ready. He is still indoctrinating his
steward.”

“
Indoctrinating?”

“
Reznak,” said Olivier.
“He’s showing him the ropes.”

“
What did you do with your
saddle?” said Urszula.

“
My saddle? Um. I must have
left it up in that meadow.”

“
What? You need to take
care of your things. How am I supposed to teach you how to ride
Trigger?”

“
Tigger,” I
corrected.

Urszula’s eyes widened and a rare
smile gripped her. She looked like a little girl who had spotted a
pony.

“
Your bug, he is listening
to me now. I got him to come down. He obeys me but only when I am
with Lalibela.”

“
Sorry Urs, but I’ve got
first dibs on him today,” said Olivier. “We’re going straight to
the grotto. Maybe he can fetch another saddle from the armory and
you can give him his flying lesson down on the lower terrace. But
not till we get some shit done.”

“
Why are we going to the
grotto?” I said.

“
Because … Yaqob insists on
you making some cracker columns to bring with us on our raid … when
we go … if we ever go.”

“
But you were there with me
in Victoria’s head. I have no clue where to start. Do
you?”

“
Nah. But the Pennies don’t
know that. Yaqob figures if we bring along some fakes … and I mean
some convincing replicas … we can better protect the real one. Fake
them out with some misdirection while we plant the real one. And
who knows? We build something close, maybe we can tweak it and get
it to work.”

I sighed. “Alright. I’ll see what I
can do.”

“
Midday,” said Urszula, her
eyes admonishing as she clambered up and over a wall. “We have
appointment. Clearing outside of armory. You be there.”

Chapter 46:
Replicas

Dazed and lost in thought, twice
Olivier had to ask me to come with him before I dragged myself off
my mats. I could not stop thinking about my encounter with Karla in
the Singularity and her admission that Wendell had nothing to do
with her disappearance. So she had gone off on her own. I had
suspected as much. I understood what drove her to do it. But I
could not quite get my head around how I was supposed to feel about
it.

I still missed her badly. I wanted and
needed to be with her. But I couldn’t help but feel a little
betrayed, though that betrayal did not change how I felt one iota.
My heart still longed for her. I the only way to hasten our reunion
was for me to continue to do my best to help the
resistance.

I took solace in believing that
failure was an option. If things didn’t work and New Axum fell and
we were all driven back underground, she would know I had given it
my best shot. She would have no reason not to come back to me. The
only way I would lose her would be to completely give up on this
quest. Then Wendell might enter the picture and make sure we stayed
apart. But Karla would never forgive me if I didn’t at least
try.

I don’t know what I was going to tell
the ladies of Brynmawr whenever, if ever I got back to Glasgow. How
would they take the news that Karla need not be found anymore? They
were having such a blast on this missing persons hunt. It would be
such a letdown for them to be sent back to Brynmawr without finding
her.

And maybe I held out the slightest
hope that they would succeed, that we would find Karla somewhere in
Scotland, and that would trump her scheme to keep me in the
Liminality. If only we could see each other in person I knew I
could make her see the hopelessness of ever defeating Penult. Maybe
then some gears would shift in head and she would accept the
possibility of life with me in the living world.

Olivier led me through the warren with
the surety of someone who had lived here all his life. Some people
just had a knack for navigation. Me, I could get lost wandering a
mall, and I had, frequently, back when my mom used to take me
shopping in Orlando.

The Old Ones manning the cliff top
were just as silent and oblivious to our presence as the night
before. I could only hope that they would respond a little
differently if some cherubs happened by.

Sounds of battle echoed across the
cloud forest on the rim of the lower terrace.

“
Just a skirmish,” said
Olivier, continuing down the stairs. “No worries. We still hold the
high ground.” Three mantids came diving over the cliff edge, their
spiked forelimbs ready for action. “Not to mention air
superiority.”

As we made our way down, Urszula came
swooping across the cliff face on Lalibela’s back. Tigger trailed
close on their tail like a fledgling duck.

“
I don’t know why she’s
fussing about lessons,” said Olivier. “It’s not like she’s teaching
you how to pilot a Piper Cub. These dragonflies pretty much fly by
themselves. Even the babies. It’s probably easier than riding a
horse.”

“
That’s good.”

“
Why’s that?”

“
Because I’ve never ridden
a horse.”

“
Honestly? Not even a pony
ride? Such a deprived child.”

We reached the bottom to find the
entrance to the grotto well-guarded, including a new pair of
bunkers flanking each side. There was a gouge in the floor where
they had pried Victoria free of the stone. It was studded with bits
of hardened root, traces of her woody cocoon.

“
Zhang’s not really gonna
set Victoria free, is he?”

“
Jeez, I hope not,” said
Olivier. “He still thinks she can be rehabilitated. Personally, I
think she’s a lost cause.”

The saw horses that had held the
cracker column were empty but there were still pieces of damaged
columns strewn about the armory, some cleanly broken off at the
segment, others crushed or torn apart.

I went up to one of the larger chunk
and studied it, intimidated as always by the sheer complexity of
its internal structure. Bundles of unmodified root writhed in sacks
beside it.

“
How many of these things
does he want us to make?”

“
I don’t know,” said
Olivier. “It would be nice to have a couple replicas, at least.
Then we could do a little three card monte with them.

My eyes traced the intricate patterns
of ridges and bumps, the practically seamless junctures between
segments, the perfectly inlaid rings of spikes that unfolded when
the device was deployed, like so many crowns of thorns.

“
I … I don’t where to
start.”

“
Don’t worry about it.
We’re making replicas, remember? We just gotta make them look good.
Realistic.”

Olivier crouched and tried to lift a
cracker fragment off the mat. He raised it easily, without having
to strain.

“
Holy Christ! It feels like
Styrofoam. Like a movie prop.”

“
Yeah. They’re basically
hollow with lots of space in their internal structure. Billions of
tubes, one molecule thick. That much I could see.”

“
Tubes, huh?”

“
And they’re wrapped around
each other in spirals and helices.”

“
Sounds to me like you’re
getting it.”

“
Not really. That’s about
as far as I can go in describing them.”

“
Don’t overthink it. It’s
probably something simple. Like those wing joints turned out to
be.”

“
This is still about making
replicas. Right?”

“
Yeah, sure. I mean …
whatever. Make them look real and that’s fantastic. If we luck out
and get one that actually works, well then, that’s … gravy. But
don’t think about what you can’t do, think about what you can.
Otherwise you just psych yourself out.”

“
I thought weapons were
your specialty?”

“
Me?” Olivier shrugged. “I
know me a few tricks. I can raise a dust cloud that never settles.
I can make will bombs. But that’s about it.”

Something crashed into the trees
ringing the clearing below us. As Olivier pulled aside the curtain
to see what was going on, another projectile came hurtling over the
lower rim. Both guards ducked inside but Olivier stood calmly as it
struck the cliff wall somewhere above us, sending a shower of
rubble cascading down over the entrance. When the avalanche ceased
Olivier stepped outside to peruse the cliff face.

“
Oh shit! That hit just
took out the up staircase. No worries, though. The other set looks
okay.”

“
Do we need to clear
out?”

“
Nah. You keep at it, kid.
Our forces have firm control of the lower rim. I’ll let you know if
things get out of hand. Besides, Urszula’s out here. We can always
evacuate by bug.”

The fighting kept me uneasy, but I
tried my best to ignore it. I unstrapped one of the many bundles of
extremely lively, unconsolidated roots that apparently had been
gathered somewhere in the lowlands. Most roots up here in the
heights fixed and ossified into structures that were difficult to
undo. In fact, after what Victoria had done to me, I was pretty
sure that most in not all of the stone we saw was nothing more than
transformed root.

The lowland roots proved
extraordinarily malleable. Sword in hand, I easily stirred them
into place, aligning and tightening them into a column that
approximated the girth of the cracker I was using as a model. I
unwrapped more bundles and stirred them into the structure,
lengthening it until it was about twenty feet long.

Once I had myself a pillar of about
the right size, I went to work on the surface texture and internal
structure, adding a pebbly grain, dividing the fibers, hollowing
them out, twisting them around each other the way they were inside
the column the Singularity showed us.

I was mighty pleased with how my work
was going until Olivier came over and tried to lift it.

He strained to get it off the
ground.

“
Whoa! This is like ten
times as heavy as the real one. No was a bug is going to be able to
carry this.”

I sighed. “I can work on making them
lighter. This was just a start.”

“
Yeah, sure. Keep at it,
kid. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

But once I broke my train of thought,
my progress slowed. I thinned up the walls of each tube and removed
a bunch of weight. I carved deep indentations at the juncture of
each segment, but couldn’t figure out how to make them rotate
without screwing up the central core. The column looked pretty
realistic if you didn’t get too close, but this was about the best
I was going to be able to do.

Olivier stayed by the entrance,
mingling with the guards and monitoring the progress of the battle
raging outside. It was hard to tell what was going on through the
thick forest, but from the way the mantid riders in the treetops
kept retreating in an ever wider arc, it sure looked like the enemy
had established a beachhead.

“
Jimmy boy, we might need
to clear out of here real soon. I’m not liking the looks of things
out there.”

I tried lifting the copy. It was much
lighter than wood now and raised up easily off the
ground.

“
I’m almost done, I think.
Got one replica made, anyhow. Light enough for a bug to carry. Can
probably shed a few more pounds if I work at it.”

“
Any chance we can get it
to generate some rootquakes?”

I looked at him like he was nuts.
“Nah. No way. The knobs are just for show. The segments don’t even
turn.”

Olivier tried to hide his
disappointment, but I could see it in his eyes and the set of his
jaw. His insistence that our only goal was to make a replica had
been a ploy. He had just wanted to put me at ease and relax me
enough to get me over whatever mental block was keeping me from
getting the job done.