The Fourth Sage (The Circularity Saga) (4 page)

She puts on black leggings, a dark gray turtleneck, and a zipped sweater. Depending on what time of year, it can get freezing cold in the ducts, especially during the summer months when massive amounts of cold air are being pumped through the building. A wool cap is the final piece of her outfit.

Her heart rate is not slowing down. She puts her hand on her forehead but it shows no sign of a fever. She is not dizzy but, judging by her pulse, she’s just run up a few dozen stairs. She also has the slight sense that her brain isn't functioning as it normally does. Underneath all this, and not accessible to her conscious mind at the moment, is the thought that she is forgetting something. She takes a couple of sips from her water bottle, breathes in deeply a few times and turns off the forest program in her room. The music had stopped automatically a while ago. She opens the duct cover and slides inside.

There is usually enough residual light to see what's in front of her—not too far into the ducts but enough to see where she is going. After about eight feet, she encounters the first vertical shaft. She knows where this one is going, has used it many times in the past, together with all the ones that branch off from it. Tonight, she has a different plan. She has a sense of where the shaft with the marked metal grid is; maybe not exactly, but enough to be able to move in its general direction. In order to reach it she has to get to the other side of the building's core. The motor she'd repaired this morning is located almost exactly diagonally across from her current location, a few floors up. She knows she needs to follow the ducts on the horizontal plain, moving left on most intersections and then move upward for a while.

Her sense of where she is in the vast space of the massive maze of ducts is all she can count on. Without it, she would be lost and never find her way back to her room. The duct she is currently in is the smallest kind. It connects to a larger channel that picks up other side channels and leads in turn to an even larger one. In that one, Aries can walk. Not quite upright but she can use her legs rather than crawl on her stomach.

After a few minutes, Aries comes to a T and a larger duct. From here she is able to use her knees. She is so used to moving like this that she doesn't think twice about it; for her it's almost as natural as walking. In fact, she has over time perfected this way of moving from point A to B to such a degree that she can move through the ductwork while making almost no sound at all.

She turns left and now moves on her hands and knees to yet another intersection. By her estimation, she should now be close to the dining room. When she thinks about her encounter with Seth this morning, she becomes aware of her still-pounding heart. The undercurrent of panic she had felt before now makes its way to the foreground of her mind. She’s never experienced this kind of panic, especially if there was no obvious reason for it, such as her fear of heights or the feeling of dread before she enters the dining room every morning.

Push through it,
she thinks.
It'll go away eventually.

Before she makes another left turn at the third intersection that leads directly toward the building's core, she looks to her right. The darkness of the duct makes it impossible to see further than about twenty feet. She squints her eyes to see better. There is movement. Just beyond the area that is visible, she can see something in the duct. She can also hear it over the pounding of her heart. A flapping sound. Then stillness. Then another flapping sound and something scraping over metal.

Her sense of panic doesn't feel so abnormal anymore. Is there someone else in here? But this doesn't sound like someone moving through the ducts. It's stationary. Her view of the air duct in front of her is overlaid by another image—a much brighter duct with a figure kneeling in it, about thirty feet away from her.

Aries lets out a low scream and moves into the duct she came from, pushing her back against one of the sides. What the hell was this? The vision of the figure has disappeared again. She can still hear the flapping sounds and the occasional scraping over the metal surface. The impulse to go back to her room, as fast as she possibly can, is overwhelming.

When she peeks around the corner and looks into the duct, the double vision from earlier appears again. This time she sees a brightly lit duct with the head of a figure appearing at the end. Something clicks and Aries has the sense that she is sharing this image. As if she sees through someone or something else's eyes. The image disappears again. Just as she decides to move and—against all her better judgment—go toward the flapping sound, she hears a piercing cry.

It sounds unlike anything she has ever heard, yet at the same time strangely familiar. But it is also completely unsettling. The echo generated by the air ducts amplifies the sound almost to the level of a continuous shriek. She freezes, thinking that this is it—this is where and how her young life will end when whatever is making that sound moves with immense speed toward her and takes her.

But then she feels it. Behind the panic and the eerie cries, she senses something else. Whatever lurks on the other end of the duct is as scared as she is. There is no malice, but pure and utter fear. For a moment, Aries is torn—torn between going back to her room and forgetting this whole episode, and crawling toward whatever it is that waits in the darkness.

Without thinking about it any further and following sheer instinct rather than rational thought, Aries moves away from the wall and turns the corner. Slowly, she crawls toward the shrieking.

She still can't see much until after a few more feet she recognizes a shape. The flapping thing is a wing. A bird? How did it get in here? How is this even possible?

"Shhh," is all she can muster. "Shhh, I won't hurt you. Be still. Otherwise we'll both get caught." It is as if Aries can sense the slightest calming of the other. She decides to keep going. Suddenly she sees another overlaid image in her mind. This time it is very clear: in the bright air duct, the figure she looks at is herself. It is as if she sees what the bird sees.
Preposterous,
is all she can think.

Until she realizes that the panic she is feeling is not her own. Not at all. It is that of the bird. And now she recognizes what kind of bird it is. She has seen its kind before in one of the nature programs she had purchased.
Birds of Prey
, the program was called. It showed predator birds in their natural environment. It dawns on her at that moment that what she sees in front of her is without doubt a bird of prey. A young one, but still… The patterns on its wings bring back the memory. Deep inside the maze of pipes and shafts and air ducts that make up the core and lifeline of the super high-rise in a nameless desert city belonging to a world that has been almost uninhabitable for close to a century, Aries is looking at a baby hawk, caught in part of a nylon netting.

The little guy looks pathetic, with his feathers ruffled and the netting wrapped around one of his feet. Now Aries can feel the pain the little creature endures. It comes from the nylon strings cutting into the skin of its talon.

"Shhh, it's okay. Let me help you." She comes closer, trying to act calm but not having much success. The hawk flutters, growing more frantic the closer she comes. Its piercing cries fill the air ducts almost to the point of hurting Aries's ears. The cries bring with them her own fear that someone, or something, is going to hear them. What if they are above someone's sleeping quarters or a common area? She has to do something, and soon, to calm the hawk down.

Talking softly to the bird, she edges slowly closer, until she is about six feet away. That's when her wristwatch begins to vibrate. First she thinks it's the alarm for the one-hour loop, signaling that it is close to the end. But that's a different signal.
Oh no!
she thinks, as she touches her watch, traces an invisible line on its surface. A digital clock appears. Its numbers pulsate in one-second increments. 2:59, 2:58, 2:57. It's the warning for the duct cleaning. It'll start in two minutes and now fifty-two seconds. How could she have forgotten this? Usually, whenever she enters the ducts, she makes sure she has enough time before the next duct sterilization. Maybe it was because of her earlier panicked state that she’d completely forgot about it.

In two seconds, Aries processes several pieces of information. First, it would most likely take her more than two minutes and fifty seconds to get back to her room. She might be able to pull it off but it would be very, very tight. Secondly, if she made it safely to her room in that time, the hawk would most certainly die. Nothing alive can stand the microwaves generated by the Raytheon's high-frequency burst. It would fry her within seconds.

The conflict of her life versus that of the hawk lasts an instant before she makes her choice. She moves toward the panicked bird. Without further thought, she envisions the image of the forest program in her mind. While she crawls the last few feet, she sees in her mind’s eye the trees reaching far up toward the sky. At the same time she makes eye contact with the hawk.
I won't hurt you,
she thinks. Almost immediately, the hawk calms and his flapping weakens. Whether that’s because of the image she holds in her mind or out of sheer exhaustion, Aries doesn't know.

Then she reaches the small bird, takes him into the palm of her hand. He is larger than her hand but she can easily fit him into it and hold on to him. She stretches out her hand and grabs him, gently but firmly, so that she has both wings under control. With her other hand she begins to untangle the hawk's foot. "How did you get in here, huh?" she says quietly. "How could you possibly have gotten in here?"

Aries forces herself not to think about the time that is bleeding out of the present moment and heading toward the inevitable. "Poor thing, hold on, almost there," she says, while trying to keep the image of the forest in her mind's eye. For whatever reason, that seems to be the calming factor for the hawk.

"There you go. All good now. We're all good now." She pulls the last thread from the talon and the bird is free. Aries turns her head, looks back toward where she came from. "Sorry about that," she says. Without thinking, she opens the zipper of her sweatshirt, pushes the hawk inside, and closes it. "Try to stay calm," she says. Then she turns around and moves as quickly as she can back toward the last intersection. A brief glance at her watch tells her that she won’t make it.

She turns left, back into the duct she’d come from. It leads toward the one closer to the dining hall. When she gets to the next intersection, her watch shows thirty-eight seconds. She makes a right turn, moves into another duct.
I'm gonna be dead soon
, she thinks, while moving as fast as possible through the small space. Twenty-eight seconds. Before her and to her left, a smaller duct goes off, perpendicular to this one. She assumes that it leads into one of the rooms. Not hers. She decides it's probably better to land in someone else's room than it is to get fried by high levels of microwaves and crawls inside.

She moves forward while pushing off her elbows.
I hope the vent cover isn't bolted shut from the other side
. Her watch now pulsates in one-second increments. Red and blue. Less than ten seconds. She reaches the grill, pushes against it. Once. Twice. Three times. "Come on, come on! Come
on!
" On the fourth attempt it opens and bounces into the room. She crawls through the opening, pulls her feet out of the duct. Her watch goes dark. Zero seconds. Her heart beats so loud she barely hears the low vibration coming on in the ducts. It lasts fifteen seconds. Then it stops. Aries lies on her back, trying to catch her breath.

The sensors should pick up her presence at any moment now. The screen with the corporate logo will probably come on, followed by a message to either come in to see her supervisor in the morning or, more likely, to stay where she is and wait to be picked up by security.

"You have twenty minutes, roughly, to get back to your quarters." The voice comes from the other side of the room. "That's when your one-hour loop expires."

* * *

Aries turns her head. Until now, she’d been so focused on getting out of the duct that she hadn't even thought about where she’d landed and who would be there when she did. On a futon in a corner of the otherwise dark room sits a figure, legs crossed. The hood over his head hides him slightly. His face is illuminated by the pad he holds in front of him.

"That was close, huh?" he says. His fingers trace an invisible line on his pad and dim light comes on, emanating from the screens on the walls.

Aries looks around. All four walls look as if they are packed to the brim with leather-bound books on thick shelves. But not only that. The spatial illusion goes far past an ordinary room with books in it; the library extends in all directions and into a seemingly endless room of massive proportions. It is very hard to make out if this is an image on a screen or a real room. The illusion is almost perfect. But how is this possible? Images of libraries or anything related to books have been banned for almost two centuries. To have this program on anyone's screen would be punishable by prison.

"I was hoping you'd find your way in here one day," he says, and looks up. And now she recognizes his face. It's Kiire. The boy who’d sat at her table that morning.

"I'm sorry to intrude. I didn't mean to come in here so... unexpectedly." That's all Aries can come up with. Her mother always told her that if she couldn’t think of anything to say, at least say something nice.