Trapped

With so many individual turbines and so many pillars holding up the roof, the Keepers would have had plenty of places to hide for an ambush; but apart from the single corpse, there was no one left in the room. After a while, I realized the Keepers must want to avoid a firelight in the midst of their machinery: Element guns could damage the generators, or even bring down the ceiling. That would be disastrous, especially since this equipment was virtually irreplaceable-the turbines were OldTech originals, bearing the names of defunct manufacturers, covered with a hundred coats of paint, jury-rigged with patch-wires, emergency welds, and other obvious repairs to squeeze a few more years from antique rust-heaps. A battle in this room might put the final nail in the coffin of machines that were ready to be junked anyway.

How long before this whole place ground to a halt from its own obsolescence? A few years, no more. If Jode had possessed any patience, the blasted Lucifer could have sat back and waited for this plant to stop on its own.

But that wasn't Jode's way. A passive approach wouldn't produce nearly enough death and suffering.

I tightened my grip on the Element gun and continued forward.

The far end of the chamber held another doorway… or rather a hole knocked into the room's original wall. This wasn't the work of Sebastian-this hole had clean edges painted the same green as the rest of the place. I suspected the hole had been dug when the Sparks took over the power plant, whenever that was.

The opening was three paces wide and the same distance high, hidden from other parts of the room by nearby turbines. I appreciated the concealment. The Ring of Knives were somewhere to our rear; by now, they must have picked up Element guns of their own, plucked from the hands of dead Keepers. Our only protection was staying out of sight: scuttling into the hole in front of us before Elizabeth Tzekich could catch up. I had the strong suspicion we were retreating down a dead-end passage… but staying put was certain suicide.

Jode and Sebastian were somewhere ahead. No doubt Dreamsinger was too-since she hadn't joined the ambush at the elevator or taken a stand to prevent Jode from reaching the generator room, she must be farther on, protecting something even more important. An electric cage full of Lucifers? I didn't know… but I'd soon find out.

The hole in the wall led to a tu

Now, however, the power was dead. Not just because the Falls were shut off: each of the electric cables had been severed cleanly near the mouth of the tu

The tu

Anyway, the people watching from farther up the tu

The first indication was the barrel of an Element gun dangling limply from a slit in the tu

The body had been compressed to a bloody mass the size of a roast turkey. Its top still showed dark curly hair; near the bottom was a recognizable toe; but in between lay nothing except a mangle of flesh and robes, with slivers of bone sticking out at sharp angles. I could only conjecture that the air had closed around the gu

Blood had squirted like juice from a squeezed tomato. Death must have been quick and loud. I could almost hear the crunching of bones still echoing through the tu

And the wall had many more slits… with many more balled-up corpses. This was the kill-zone A

But the people behind the gun-slits had no protection against psionics. Sebastian talked to his nanite friends… and the Keepers' resistance had literally been crushed.

The tu

I was therefore glad when I saw light ahead-even though it meant we were approaching the final hell. One way or another, this would soon be over. Sebastian, Jode, Dreamsinger, and the Ring had all drawn together… with us in the middle.

End of the line. End of the quest. I was drained enough to be happy it had finally arrived.

The Caryatid gestured for her fireball to stay back so we could approach the tu

The final chamber looked almost as big as the generator room, but lit more dimly: with a faint violet glow like a guttering candle-flame inside tinted glass. The light didn't come from bulbs overhead; it trickled from the middle of the room, barely strong enough to reach the rock-hewn walls.

Hush, hush, moving slowly: the Caryatid and Impervia stuck close to the right hand wall of the tu

The Caryatid's "feeling" had been right. The power plant's secret was a prison: a perfect cube, twenty by twenty by twenty meters, raised slightly off the floor. Its edges were sharp strands of violet light-so straight they had to be OldTech lasers, their beams crisp but with a grainy texture. Where the beams met at each corner, a small box of glass and chrome floated in the air… not suspended on wires or poles, but simply hovering as if supported by the light rays themselves. I suspected those boxes were the source of the lasers, each little machine projecting the light in razor-fine lines to the three adjacent corners. The faces of the cube, framed by violet, looked perfectly transparent-nothing there, as if you could simply step over the nearest edge-beam and into the cube's interior. I knew that couldn't be true. A prison is still a prison, even if you can't see the walls.