farther back. At the edge of the radius she held herself up against the wall for a moment. The follower took a hesitant step toward her. Mischa plunged away into the blood-red darkness.
The tunnel floor was a quagmire, the dimness a filmy curtain across her eyes. She stumbled on.
More by feel than by sight she knew she had reached her home. The tunnel walls were rough and natural instead of smooth and finished. Her fingers scraped over stone to the fissure.
She fell inside, like a toy with all the joints bent backwards.
Mischa began to come to, fighting to reach the surface of consciousness. Her struggle became an actual physical effort of grasping and twisting and climbing upward from a deep abyss. Survival drove her; not knowing what surrounded her, she had to make herself safe.
'It's all right, everything's all right, Misch. Go back to sleep.'
She finally heard the voice and felt gentle hands on her shoulders, holding her down. She fought for a minute before she identified the voice as friend-not-foe, no more, and the words hardly far enough to grasp their meaning. She almost continued the long impossible journey but the voice soothed and reassured her, and she slipped back into the crevasse of unconsciousness.
She lived an endless sequence of fever dreams. Later, the details were never clear. Time stretched out, and every dream drew her deeper, farther from light and air and iridescent sand and sun and ships and stars.
Then she was trapped in true darkness. Like a wounded cat, she slept. A barrier stood before her, but when she tried to pass, it was too slick and high to climb. When she tried to go around it, she traveled in an unchanging straight line that returned her to her starting point, which was unmarked but which, somehow, she recognized. The anger of frustration welled up inside her. She used it to beat at the barrier. It exploded, silently, leaving dense fog and smoke. She walked through the debris for a long, long time.
The fog dispersed slowly. Mischa lay on her stomach in her bed. She was alone in her niche, and she could not remember when the aura of friend-not-foe had dimmed and disappeared. She sat up. On her side, heavy scabs were beginning to flake away over shiny scar tissue. The wounds had been washed and carefully tended. Her time- sense was thoroughly skewed. She thought she had been unconscious for a couple of days at least, but she was not hungry.
She stood up. She was stiff, weak, a little shaky. Her pants and torn shirt lay on the floor in a corner, filthy and ruined, so she put on a clean pair of pants from the big wooden chest, and laid aside a jacket of the same
smooth-worn material. Then, feeling foolish, she had to sit down and rest.
Mischa heard a noise and scraping outside her cave. She slipped aside, next to the entrance, but did not have time to cover the bright and well-fed lightcells. Someone pushed the curtain away and dropped a bag inside. Kiri slipped in and slid to the floor. She stood up awkwardly, saw that Mischa was not in her bed, looked around with alarm, and found her with relief.
'You're losing business,' Mischa said.
'You shouldn't be up.'
'When is it?'
Kiri told her. Her estimate of two days was a day too short. Mischa sat on the wooden chest and started to pull her knees up under her chin, but stopped when she found how much it hurt to bend her shoulders forward. 'Listen,' she said. 'Thanks.'
Kiri shrugged, and turned away. 'Old debt.' Her voice was soft. Mischa let the subject drop. Kiri owed her nothing. If she owed Chris, then she must know he could never be repaid.
'How do you feel?'
'Pretty good.'
Kiri pulled a hot bottle out of her bag and opened it. The odor it released was pleasant, and while Mischa could not remember a particular time of having smelled it before, it was familiar. Hungrier than she had realized, she accepted the steaming broth and sipped it. 'Did you get in trouble?'
Kiri shook her head. 'But I didn't find out until too late to get a bondsperson.' She brought Mischa's knife out of her pocket and handed it to her. 'Nobody'd stolen it when I got there.' Mischa valued the knife, and had not expected to get it back. 'Hey, Kiri,' She could not think of anything to say that did not sound silly.
'Eat your soup,' Kiri said.
After Kiri left, Mischa slept for a few hours, but when she awoke she was too restless to stay in bed. She eased into the jacket and walked slowly down the radius. When she reached the helix she sat on the edge of the path and looked out over Center. Stone Palace was like a slash in the wall, bare and uglier than the shanty-hut units and crowded people and everything else that made Center what it was. She knew she could do nothing, right now, but she swore to herself that someday she would bring the extravagant appointments of the Palace down around the elegant Lady Clarissa's head.
In that instant, an explosion crumbled a section of the Palace wall. The cavern shuddered. In the moment before shock wave and sound and bits of debris reached her, Mischa threw herself around and down. Dust and rubble fell on her back. She winced and turned on her side, shielding her face. The blast echoed back and forth, slowly, like ripples in a long pond.
All the lights went out.
People began to scream. Mischa had realized several years before that she could see better in the dark than most people, that she could see in some places where other people could not see at all, but she had not realized that the ability had protected her from a primeval fear. From every direction, fifteen seconds of terror washed over her: few in Center had ever experienced total darkness. Mischa compared the deprivation cell to what the people around her must be going through, and understood their panic.
The lights flickered on, dimmed, brightened. The feeling of terror faded much more slowly than its sounds.
The results of the blast seemed hardly to justify its force. There was a new opening in the Palace facade, at ground level. Workers swarmed around it as soon as the dust had cleared. Mischa sat up, brushed herself off, and watched. As she scrambled to a better vantage point, the change in the cavern wall kept catching on the corner of her vision.
The workers began to smooth the blasted edges, forming a new doorway to the lower level of the Palace. People on First Hill, which faced the Palace, stood on their balconies pitching stones and gravel out into the Circle. Mischa saw no bodies or blood, which was on the order of a miracle.
She began to notice other, more subtle changes: an undercurrent of excitement, more people along the arc where the bars were clustered. It was like early spring, when several of Blaisse's ships came in at once. Mischa was beginning to tire, but her curiosity kept her going. She started down the helix and met Kiri coming up.
'You do get around.'
'What's going on?'
'I guess the new people decided they needed a private entrance in Stone Palace.'
'What new people?'
'A ship landed while you were healing.'
'In the storms—? And you didn't tell me—'
'I thought I could keep you resting,' Kiri said. 'I yield.'
'Who are they? How—?'
'Come back home and I'll tell you what I know. Which isn't much.'
They returned to Mischa's niche.
Jan Hikaru's Journal:
Earth: clouds, a walk through a sandstorm that would kill an unprotected person, a maze of caverns, trapped human beings. I believe that the city we are in grew up inside one of the huge bomb shelters built here before the Last War. We are in gaudily appointed rooms that I find irritating, but they seem to suit the other people from the ship.
I haven't buried my friend's body yet; I can't until I know the customs. I'm acquainted with no one. Whom should I ask? Beggars? Slaves? (There are slaves in this society. How can I do nothing, knowing that?)
I can't stay in the Palace, I can't stay with the pseudosibs and their people. I have no place here, I want none. But I haven't any other place either.
Am I just afraid? When something happens that I can't accept, that I as an individual could protest, will I rationalize inaction?
