Trapped

I leaned over the edge of the hole. Lying tight against the wall was A

She looked at me and smiled. "Keepers might be good with electrical things, but they sure are lousy shots."

I held her in my arms as Impervia bandaged A

A

But A

I held her tightly and lowered my face against the top of her head. I didn't cry; I just breathed in the warm fragrance of her hair.

"Phil… Phil!" The Caryatid was shaking my shoulder. "We have to get going right now."

"Can't we let A

"No," the Caryatid interrupted. "I heard voices up the elevator shaft. They're whispering, but the shaft carries echoes a long way."

"Probably the Ring of Knives," Impervia said. "No doubt, Mother Tzekich has been ru

Either that, I thought, or Tzekich noticed the Falls had stopped flowing and came to investigate. She'd have seen Pelinor's body in the roadway, immediately in front of the power plant. After that, it was just a matter of following our tracks.

A

I helped her to her feet. As I did, Impervia slipped off her own winter coat and draped it around A

"She's already got mine," Impervia said. "I don't need it-this place is heated. Anyway, a coat will only slow me down if the time comes for… punishing the wicked."

Impervia smacked her right fist into her left palm. I stifled a laugh. In the past twenty-four hours, Impervia had been kicked by fishermen, gut-punched by Hump, kicked by Zunctweed, tossed around by Sebastian… and still she was looking for a fight.

A

When I stifled the laugh this time, I nearly hurt myself.

I kept my arm around A

As we passed the fallen Keepers, A

"You want one too?" she asked.

Thinking of Pelinor and Myoko, I nodded. This was not just a quest; this was war.

22: HALF A LEAGUE, HALF A LEAGUE, HALF A LEAGUE ONWARD

A single door led forward. It had once been equipped with a fancy electronic lock co

Beyond lay a short corridor with a door in each side wall and another at the far end. All three doors had been blown off their hinges.

The side doorways opened into locker rooms where the plant's OldTech perso

Our friend Caryatid had also developed a liking for displays of mystical force. Before this business started, I'd never seen her juggle flames any larger than a big candle-but now she'd built a blaze the size of a cow's head, floating in front of us at chest height and pouring out heat like a furnace. No one dared step within five paces of it… no one except the Caryatid, whose face glistened with heat-sweat. She barely seemed to notice; she and her flameball just plowed ahead toward the next smashed-in doorway.

The entrance to the main machine room.

The place was as big as the academy's main building: a single chamber more than four stories high and a hundred meters square, its ceiling supported by dozens of pillars. The walls and floors were painted kelp-green; they tinted the space like a sea-grotto, ripe and weedy. In OldTech times, the place must have been brightly lit-bank upon bank of fluorescent fixtures hung from the roof, with multiple light-tubes in each fixture. But the days were long gone when such tubes could be mass-produced. Three-quarters of the fixtures had no light at all, and the remainder each only held a single long bulb. The result was an oceanic dimness, a full-fathom-five gloom filled with shadows.

Most of the shadows came from huge turbines held down by massive bolts that passed through the plastic floor and down into firmer footings below… possibly all the way to bedrock. The turbines were great hulking things with monstrous cooling fans, the actual turbine blades unseen under thick metal hoods. Water from the Falls ran through pipes beneath the false floor, rushing through the turbines and out again to the river. I had the impression this place should be deafeningly loud-roaring water, spi

We could see no movement. No one was close to the door we'd just entered, and our view farther in was blocked by the ponderous machinery. A single corpse lay halfway between us and the nearest turbine: a middle-aged woman in brown Keeper's habit, facedown with a spill of moist white nuggets puddled on the floor beneath her. After choking her, the white goo had dribbled out of her mouth. The Caryatid dispatched a fireball to incinerate the alien curds; they burned with a hissing splutter, the only sound in the whole cavernous space.

Impervia turned to the rest of us and mouthed, Wait; listen. A

So we moved forward-like a platoon in enemy territory, walking silently in a line between trees. In our case, the "trees" were giant steel generators, two stories tall, their cooling fans motionless. The sparse lighting proved the station still had power, but it must have been coming from batteries; the turbines had all run dry.