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After Vogel has punched in the codes inside the lift, she turns to me. ‘Anything I should know about last night?'

‘Not really.'

‘Don't want to tell me what happened with the primal?' she asks lightly.

‘No.'

Vogel chuckles. ‘By the sounds of it, he was on the edge as it was. But don't worry. You'll be fine with Aaron by your side.'

When the doors slide open we step into a wide corridor ending with a heavy blast door. A touchpad sits beside it and Vogel places her hand over the centre. A screen springs to life, illuminating a blue keypad. Vogel enters a code and the doors grind open, heavy and slow. She steps through, beckoning me to follow her into a cavernous room full of techies suited up in brown nanosuits, bustling about a massive circular structure. An array of structural steel levels brace the room, with elevated work platforms and what looks like viewing booths lining the lower levels.

‘Is that it?' I'm momentarily stunned that my parents were in charge of something so huge and imposing. Something so …
important
.

‘That's it,' Vogel says as we approach. ‘The one and only Ciliary Gate.'

The structure of the gate is flower-like, with a centre point about eight meters in diameter, with an internal framework built around it. Around the perimeter, a dozen petal-like formations of exposed steel assemblies carry a network of wire, thick optic cables, hydraulic pipework and ancient looking circuitry rigged into neural nets. The overall structure looks about twenty-five metres in height, with the centre accessible by stairs and a retractable bridge. On the ground, metal screens with viewing ports sit in front of the gate, shielding monitoring equipment. Electricity hums up from the floor, vibrating through my legs, as if someone has whacked a giant tuning fork and pitched it into the ground. A figure in a nanosuit, visor up, walks towards us and I recognise Eckhart.

‘I'm glad you're here, Josie. You've made the right choice.' He gestures to a doorway near the viewing booths. ‘As soon as you're changed, we'll get started.'

‘Why the suits?' I ask Vogel.

‘Just extra precautions,' she tells me. ‘Everyone's safety is a priority.'

She leads me to a utility area filled with equipment and cubicles loaded with nanosuits. Vogel hands me one, then begins to strip. I do the same and pull on the suit, though Vogel ends up helping me when my nerves get the better of me. When we're ready, we find Aaron waiting outside. His face splits into a wide grin when he sees me.

‘How you feeling?' he asks. Since I don't think it's polite to say I'm so frightened I want to vomit all over my spiffy nanosuit, I just shrug. Aaron directs me towards the gate. ‘Don't look so worried. You'll be fine. Let's get into position.'

As we draw closer to the Ciliary Gate, I sense the lowest petal structures humming with power. Hydraulic arms come online to push the petals in a back and forth motion and soon, all the surrounding mechanisms of the gate are moving in harmony. The effect is mesmerizing, with the eight metre high petals appearing to flutter around the centre.

‘Incredible, isn't it?' Aaron sounds awed and I don't blame him, feeling pretty amazed myself.

Eckhart appears, his eyes bright, gloved hands clenching and unclenching by his side. He points to a painted X just under the gate. ‘Shall we start?'

‘Wait,' I say. My lips are very dry and I run my tongue over them, but it feels like I'm all out of saliva. I wonder if people will be annoyed if I need a time out for some water. Maybe a little lie down.

‘Be calm, Josie,' Eckhart says. ‘Remember, your strength lies in your instincts.'

With those words of wisdom that do nothing for my nerves, Eckhart joins Wendell behind one of the metal shields. Most of the other techies have retreated to the viewing booths, though a handful stay behind the shields, watching us through the clear ports. My boots hit the painted X, my attention captivated by the whirring gate looming before me.

‘This is a bad idea,' I tell Aaron. ‘Just officially saying, you know.'

‘Relax.' Aaron takes my hands and squeezes them. ‘We've thought of everything.' He drops one of my hands to point at a thick line of steel that sits above the gate. ‘Even a massive blast shield that will lower the instant something happens beyond our control, sealing off the gate.'

‘Maybe you should show me the schematics of the inside, or something.'

Aaron chuckles. ‘Even I had trouble understanding them at first, Josie. You just have to trust me. We'll head to the entry through the iris.' He points to the open centre of the gate. ‘Then, beyond that, is the barrier we've talked about.'

‘Right,' I croak, wishing I'd thought to visit the bathroom.

‘I know you can do this.' Aaron picks up my hand again and holds tight.

‘Glad one of us thinks so,' I mutter. There's a crackling in my ear, then I hear Vogel's voice over the comms link.

‘I'm right here, Josie. The moment you feel like you're not coping, we'll shut it down.'

Aaron squeezes my hands. ‘Ready?'

I don't answer, because I'm really not. My nose itches as my talents shiver out of their puzzle-chest and towards Aaron. The small hairs on my nape rise as our talents thread. Then our talents link and we send ourselves towards the gate and through the iris. Inside, we're surrounded by a bright datasphere, with streaming code and pulses of electrical energy that shoot past us. As we travel forward, the world suddenly tilts and we materialise in a large white room, our consciousness now projecting images of ourselves, complete with nanosuits. There's nothing else here, save for a looming chrome wall covered with intricate patterns. On closer examination, I see the arrangements are small anachronistic computer chips surrounded with clockwork: small meshes of pinions, pulleys and springs. The effect is mesmerising, the surface of the barrier almost a maze-like puzzle.

‘Remember,' Aaron says. ‘Everything we see is created by our minds, based on our own knowledge. I've been here before many times, and I found an empty room, with a huge metallic barricade blocking my way.'

‘That's what I see as well,' I say, staring up at it in amazement.

‘I've never been able to work out how to unlock the gate from here,' Aaron says as he approaches the metallic wall. ‘No matter what I did.'

‘That's what I'm here for, right? To act as your magic swipe card.'

I can almost feel Aaron laughing now, the sensation dancing along my skin.

‘That's right,' he says. ‘I'm going to do a diagnostic check now.'

He moves to one part of the gate and extends his hands. The surface of the barrier vibrates when his fingers touch the metal and when he pulls back, tendrils of coding pull out, attached to him. The datastream wraps around his digits, snaking up to his arms and elbows.

I watch him a moment more, then stare up at the latticework of gears and switches, feeling hopelessly lost. Knowing I have to start somewhere, I move forward but can't find the beginning of the puzzle, can't get a sense of where to start. So I stand very still and clear my mind.

‘Josie?'

Aaron sounds worried and I try to ignore him. I try to listen to the barrier, hoping my instincts will kick in as Eckhart predicted, and show me where to start. I ignore the panic that begins to nibble at my mind. Instead, I turn my thoughts inwards. I remember nights as a little girl when I'd sit in bed with the blankets forming a tent around me, flashlight stuck in my mouth as I loosened one of James's trick box components, just so I could speed open it the next day to impress him.

Sensing the wall in front of me now, I pretend I'm alone. That it's just me, and this is one final puzzle from him, given to me to solve.

Reaching out to touch the wall, I feel gravity shift along my arm, pulling me towards the wall. Experimentally, I place a foot on the wall and step up, almost falling over with my new perspective as the giant wall becomes my floor.

‘Aaron!'

‘What are you doing?' Aaron steps back from the wall and the surface he's been manipulating subsides like molasses, leaving an unscarred surface.

I run along the wall, then push off in a jump, feeling the gravity of the floor take me, and I tuck my head in for a commando roll, springing to my feet near Aaron.

‘Having fun?' he asks me.

‘Maybe a little,' I pant. ‘Does anything feel different this time around?'

‘Not that I can tell. Every time I feel like I've hacked down a level of the lock, the code resets and different parameters seem to be required. It's just impossible to break.'

Once again, I step up on the gate, stomach lurching as my gravity shifts so that the wall becomes the floor. Walking around the huge barrier and seeing it spread out around me from this new angle, I realise the pattern reminds me of the dozen petal-like structures around the gate.

‘Maybe there's not just one lock,' I tell Aaron, who's watching me from the ground.

‘What are you talking about?' he asks.

‘I think there's twelve different ones.'

Crouching down, I run my hand over a groove that forms the edge of one of the petals. When I push, the surface yields and my arm plunges through to up past my elbow.

‘Josie!' Aaron shouts, and then he's at my side on the barrier, trying to pull me up.

‘I'm okay.' My fingers run over the corner of something solid and I try to get a grip on the object. Twisting my arm upwards, I manage to get a hold and it comes freely. When I pull my hand out, I see a replica of one of James's trick boxes in my grip.

‘What is it?' Aaron asks. ‘Some kind of data router?'

‘It's a puzzle. James used to make them for me. I remember this one. It's made of silver wattle.'

My fingers move around the edges of the box, finding hidden tabs and panels at bottom corners and tilting the box to allow the sliding mechanism to be freed. Each panel moves only a few millimetres, but it's enough for the top face of the box to move freely. I slide open the panel, seeing nothing inside.

‘Now what?' Aaron asks.

Holding my breath, I push the solved box back into the space it had come from. The box slides back easily, and I watch the colour and texture of the silver wattle spread out over the mechanical components that make up the surface of the petal. The clockwork begins to slowly rotate and pinions begin their never-ending journey around annular gears. Balance wheels and pendulums also begin their slow back and forth movements and a low level hum, not much more than a background noise, fills the air, punctuated with the tick-tock of clockwork.

‘Eleven more to go,' I say.

‘Eleven more,' Aaron agrees, voice quiet.

I work my way around the petals on the virtual gate, pulling a trick box from a hidden compartment in each of the assemblies and solving them as I go. The ritual is familiar and each step brings back into focus a childhood memory. The oak box James gave me after we did a hard day's trek to a nearby mountain top; the mahogany box that he made from offcuts of an old coffee table. The bluegum and myrtle boxes remind me of warm summer days and the ash of a cold winter, when we were snowed in for a week. Fingers moving faster and faster as each trick box sparks a happy memory, I quickly solve the next few: walnut, gum, beech and hickory.

The second last box is pine, and I recognise it as the last box James ever gave me. It was the most difficult one to solve, with a dozen separate steps required in sequence for a small panel on the outer edge to open and reveal its contents. I solve it with ease, placing it back where I found it, and the tanned colour of radiata pine floods another section of the giant mechanism. Instead of a metallic sheen, the wall now gleams with warm wood colours. My eyes fall on the last petal, and I'm suddenly worried, because I can't recall any other puzzles he gave me.

The noise around us has increased with each subsequent lock being opened. When I reach the final lock, I hesitantly place my hand on the surface. The warmth I felt going into the other petals is replaced by a sensation like ice water pouring over my arm. Feeling around for the trick box, I gasp as my hand comes into contact with a warm object.

‘What's wrong?' Aaron asks from the ground, where he's been watching me.

‘Nothing,' I say, though I'm not really sure.

Levering my legs against the wall, I pull the final box free.

‘What is that?' Aaron calls out to me.

The ‘box' pulses in my hands, the same size as the others, but this one appears to be made of flesh, with veins and tendons criss-crossing the outside. My blood hammers in my ears as I try to understand what this means. Then it occurs to me the pulsing of the box is in sync with my heartbeat.

‘It's me,' I say, understanding. ‘I'm the last lock.'

My TP unravels a little from the thread and enters the strange object in my hands. As I investigate, I find the inner workings are made up of organic panels, switches and springs, the same as any trick box, but pulsating with a strange life. An unnerving familiarity creeps over me and I finally unravel the tangle of compartments to see it's identical to my personal cherry wood puzzle-chest. Taking a breath, I unlock it.

Around us, the industrial noise increases and the virtual room begins to vibrate and thrum with energy. Hands shaking, I place the puzzle onto the petal and it sinks into the metal.

‘Josie, come down!' Aaron shouts.

I hurry down to join him as internal mechanisms shift and grind. Then, the coloured petals shimmer once, before the entire construct fades, revealing a massive glowing grid beyond.

With Aaron leading the way, we travel through the grid, passing multiple bobbly-things, illuminated by glowing code. As we move along a wide translucent white path, he pauses now and then to check structures and connections that branch off the path we're on. His excitement is barely contained, and it affects my talents, making them jittery and hard to control.