Blind Lake

“I can’t move. Like I said, I’m not even sure I’m awake. But I’m pretty sure I don’t need a doctor.”

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

“Why did you come to Blind Lake?”

“To kill whatever’s growing here.”

Tess was shocked. Like Dad, she thought. Mr. Sandoval had come here to kill Mirror Girl.

She backed away a step.

“It seems frankly crazy to me,” he said. “Lying here and thinking back. Fu

“It’s okay,” Tess said. “But if they’d bombed us we’d all be dead.”

As she said it she wondered whether it was true. Maybe Mirror Girl wouldn’t have let the bombs fall. Could Mirror Girl do that?

Mirror Girl seemed awfully close right now. Don’t look at the window, Tess instructed herself. But the wind rattled the glass, as if to attract her attention, as if to say, Look at me, look at me.

“I guess I know that now,” Mr. Sandoval said. “I guess I was a little crazy at the time. I thought I could climb into my plane, post a flight plan through Fargo and up into Manitoba, make a little detour at the right place… I was go

This was true, Tess realized. Motes of Mr. Sandoval’s old anger hung in the air above his bed, like snowflakes. It was adult and mysterious and somehow childish at the same time. The plan was like something Edie Jerundt might have come up with. But the anger and the grief were wholly adult. If Mr. Sandoval’s emotions had a smell, Tess thought, they’d smell like something broken and electric. Like overheated wires and blackening plastic.

“Of course,” Mr. Sandoval said, “it’s too late for that now.”

“Yes. They shot down your plane.”

“No, I mean it’s already started. Can’t you feel it?”

Tess was afraid she could.

Marguerite meant only to find out what had excited the Obs people out at the Eye. The clinic building was nearly deserted. Dr. Goldhar had left after stitching and stabilizing Sue; Rosalie Bleiler and a couple of paramedics were on night duty, plus the security and housekeeping people. Marguerite checked doors until she found an empty boardroom. Inside, she closed the door for privacy — she felt furtive, though she was doing nothing wrong — and linked her pocket server to the room’s ample display screen.

The live feed from the Eye came up quickly and crisply.

Looked like late afternoon on UMa47/E. Afternoon winds kicked dust into the air, turning the sky abalone white. Subject appeared to be continuing his enigmatic odyssey, walking a series of shallow, eroded canyons, just as he had the day before and the day before that. What was so unusual? There were no text tags from the DA people, nothing to explain their apparent excitement.

The sheer clarity of the image, perhaps? Maybe the clinic had installed a more modern display; the image was as vivid as Marguerite had ever seen it, even at the monitors out at the Eye. Clean as a window. She could see the dust clinging to the Subject’s coxcomb, each particulate grain of it. She could almost feel the desiccating breeze on her face.

This creature, she thought. This thing. This enigma.

Subject followed an ancient arroyo around another sinuous curve, and suddenly Marguerite saw what the Data Acquisition team must have spotted earlier — something so strange she took a step backward and almost tumbled over a conference room chair.

Something exceedingly strange. Something artificial. Possibly even his destination, object of the Subject’s quest.

It was obvious why this structure hadn’t been spotted in the high-altitude surveys. It was large but not ridiculously large, and its spines and columns were covered with years if not centuries of dust. It shimmered in the morning sunlight like a mirage.

Subject moved into the shadow of this structure, walking more quickly than he had for many days. Marguerite imagined she could hear his big splayed feet scuffing against the pebbly desert floor.

But what was this thing, big as a cathedral, so obviously ancient and so obviously neglected? What had made the Subject travel so far to find it?

Please, she thought, not one more mystery, not one more unfathomable act…

Subject passed beneath the first of the great spinal arches, into a softening shade.

“What do you want here?” Marguerite said aloud.

Subject turned and looked at her. His eyes were huge, solemn, and pearly white.

A thin, dry wind tousled the loose strands of Marguerite’s hair. She fell to her knees in astonishment, grasping for the conference room table, anything to support her weight. But there was only grit under the palm of her hand, the dust of ages, the desiccated surface of UMa47/E.

Twenty-Eight

When the floor moved under his feet and the klaxons began to signal the evacuation of the Eye, Ray was dismayed but not surprised. It was inevitable. Something was awake, and something didn’t like what Ray had come to do.

But he had been groomed for this confrontation. That was increasingly obvious to him. Ray wasn’t a great believer in fate, but in this case it was an idea with a great deal of explanatory power. All kinds of life experiences that had seemed mysterious at the time — the years of academic infighting, his deep skepticism about the functioning of the Eye, his first initiation so many years ago into the rites of death — made sense to him now. Even his ridiculous marriage to Marguerite, her sullen stubbor

“Blade” provoked an unwelcome memory of the events at Sue Sampel’s house. That had been purely reflexive; he had never meant to physically hurt her. She had infuriated him with that insolent, screechy laugh; and he had pushed her, and the blade had appeared in her hand and he had been forced to wrestle it away; and then, after a thoughtless moment, there had been blood. God, how he hated blood. But even that awful encounter had been a tutelary experience, Ray thought. It had proven that he was capable of a bold, transgressive act.

He was familiar enough with the layout of the Alley that he was able to locate the central elevator bank. Two of the four elevators sat empty, doors opening and closing like spastic eyelids.

The tremor that had shaken the floor had subsided now. An earthquake in this part of the country was unlikely but not impossible. But Ray doubted the tremor had been caused by an earthquake. Something was happening down below, down in the deeps of the Eye.

The night staff had obviously been well-rehearsed for an emergency evacuation. Staff poured out of the stairwells two-by-two, seeming alarmed but basically calm, probably telling themselves the tremor had stopped and the evac was a formality. One gimlet-eyed woman spotted Ray where he stood by the elevators, approached him, and said, “We’re supposed to go directly to the exit, not back down into the works. And we’re definitely not supposed to use the elevators.”

Fucking hall monitor, Ray thought. He flashed the stolen all-pass card and said, “Just leave the building as quickly as possible.”

“But we were told—”

“Unless you want to lose your job, run along. Otherwise give me your name and badge number.”