Blind Lake

Expecting blood. But there was no blood. The knife met no resistance.

She vanished like a broken bubble.

There was another tremor deep in the earth, and the opaque glass walls of the O/BEC gallery began to crumble into dust.

But it’s not really Tess, Chris thought, and he heard panicked footsteps behind him and a small voice screaming — no, this was Tess, ru

Chris turned in time to catch her by her shoulders and lift her off her feet.

She kicked and squirmed in his arms. “Let me go!”

The glass walls crumbled, opening the gallery to the O/BEC enclosure. Tendrils of a substance that looked like mother-of-pearl began to snake across the floor in lacy, symmetrical arrays. The air stank of ozone. Chris watched as Ray struggled to his feet and blinked like a man waking up from, or into, a nightmare.

Ray stumbled toward the O/BEC chamber, now an open pit.

Spikes of crystalline matter rose to the ceiling and pierced it, shaking loose a snow of plaster. The overhead fluorescent bars dimmed.

“Ray,” Chris said. “Hey, buddy. We’re not safe here. We need to get out. We need to get Tess up top.”

Tess yielded in his grip, waiting for her father to react. Chris kept a firm hand on her shoulder.

Ray Scutter gazed into the abyss in front of him. The O/BEC chamber was a well of crystalline growth three stories deep, a barrel full of glass. He gave Chris a quick, dismissive glance. “Obviously we’re not safe. That’s the fucking point.”

“Maybe you’re right. I don’t want to argue with you. We have to get Tess upstairs. We need to take care of your daughter, Ray.”

Ray seemed to be evaluating that option. But Ray wasn’t in a hurry anymore. He gave them both another long look. It seemed to Chris he had never seen such weariness in a human face.

Then his expression softened, as if he had solved a troublesome riddle. He smiled. “You do it,” he said.

Then he stepped over the edge.

Tess twisted herself out of his arms and ran headlong to the place where her father had been.

Thirty-Six

Subject vanished, and so did the cathedral arches of luminous stone and the arid highlands of UMa47/E. Marguerite blinked into a sudden disorienting darkness. The darkness became the outline of the windowless conference room on the second floor of the Blind Lake clinic. Her knees buckled. She grabbed a chair to hold herself upright. The wall screen was a flickering rectangle of meaningless noise. Loss of intelligibility, Marguerite thought.

How long had she been away? Assuming she had been gone at all. More likely she had never left this room, though every cell of her body proclaimed that she had been on the surface of UMa47/E, that she had touched the Subject’s leathery skin with her fingers.

This empty boardroom, the clinic, a snowy morning in Blind Lake, Ray’s madness: how to reinsert herself in that story? She thought of Tess. Tess, down in the reception room with Chris and Elaine and Sebastian. She took a calming breath and stepped out into the hallway.

But the hallway was busy with people in white protective suits, people carrying weapons. Marguerite stared uncomprehending until two of them approached her and took her arms.

“My daughter’s downstairs,” she managed to say.

“Ma’am, we’re evacuating this building and the rest of the buildings in the installation.” It was a woman’s voice, firm but not unfriendly. “We’ll get everyone sorted out once the premises are clear. Please come with us.”

Marguerite submitted to this indignity as far as the clinic lobby, where she was allowed to retrieve her winter coat from the back of a chair. Then she was escorted outside, into a razor-cold morning and a small crowd of clinic perso

She spotted Sebastian Vogel and Elaine Coster as they were herded into a perso

Marguerite gasped.

The concrete cooling towers were gone. No, not gone, but encapsulated, encased in a scaffolding of knotted silvery spines, crystalline minarets and arching buttresses. The encapsulating substance grew as she watched, sending out radial arms like an enormous starfish.

Tess, she thought. My baby. Don’t let my baby slip away.

Tess stood at the rim of the abyss that had contained the O/BEC platens and which was now a seething pit of glassy coral growths. For a fraction of a second Chris appreciated the incongruity of it, Tess motionless in her dusty overalls and bright yellow shirt as the gallery evolved around her; Tess gazing into the chasm where her father had disappeared.

Where she was plainly tempted to follow.

Chris walked toward her until she turned her head and gave him a warning look that was unmistakable in its intent.

He said, “Tess—”

“He jumped,” she said.

There was noise in the air now, a glassy tinkling and grinding. Chris strained to hear her. Yes, Ray had jumped. Should he acknowledge that?

Ten more steps, he thought. Ten steps and I’ll be close enough to pick her up and carry her away from here. But ten steps was a long way.

The toes of her shoes tested the abyss.

“Is he dead?” Tess asked.

Every instinct told him she would not be easily reassured. She wanted the truth.

The truth: “I don’t know. I can’t see him, Tess.”

“Come closer,” she said. Another step. “No! Not to me. To the edge.”

He moved slowly and obliquely, trying to narrow the space between them without alarming her. When he reached the pit he looked down.

Pale crystals crawled up the rim of the chamber, but the O/BEC platens were lost in a pearlescent fog. No sign of Ray.

“She’s only protecting herself,” Tess said.

“She?”

“Mirror Girl. Or whatever you want to call her. She couldn’t depend on the machines to keep her safe anymore. So she made her own.”

Was Tess talking about the O/BECs? Had they contrived to regulate their own environment and eliminate their dependency on human beings?

“I can’t see him,” Tess mourned. “Can you see him?”

“No.” Ray was gone.

“Is he dead?”

Tess wasn’t crying, but her grief was etched into her voice. A wrong word could fuel her despair and send her toppling over the edge. An obvious lie could have the same effect.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see him either.”

That was at least some of the truth, but it was also an evasion, and Tess gave him a scornful glare. “I think he died.”

“Well,” Chris said breathlessly, “it looks that way.”

She nodded solemnly, swaying.

Chris took another small step closer. How many more of these incremental movements before he could grab her and pull her back from the edge? Six? Seven?

“He didn’t like the story he was living in,” Tess said. She caught Chris in motion and shot him another warning glance. “I’m not Porry, you know. You don’t have to save me.”

“Step back from the edge, then,” Chris said.

“I haven’t decided. Maybe if you die here you don’t really die. This is turning into a special place. It isn’t Eyeball Alley anymore.”

No, Chris thought, it isn’t.

“Mirror Girl would catch me,” Tess said. “And take me away.”

“Even so, there’d be no coming back.”

“No… no coming back.”

“Porry wouldn’t jump,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Porry died,” Tess said.