‘You’re insane,’ Celestine said.
But Childe ignored her. He just stepped through the door, into the next room. Behind us the exit door slammed shut.
‘Not insane,’ he said, turning back to us. ‘Just very eager to continue.’
It was never the same thing twice.
Celestine made her selection as quickly as she could, every muscle tense with concentration, and that gave us — by Trintignant’s estimation — five or six clear minutes before the Spire would demand an answer.
‘We’ll wait it out,’ Childe said, eyeing us all to see if anyone disagreed. ‘Celestine can keep checking her results. There’s no sense in giving the fucking thing an answer before we have to; not when so much is at stake.’
‘I’m sure of the answer,’ Celestine said, pointing to the part of the frame she would eventually palm.
‘Then take five minutes to clear your head. Whatever. Just don’t make the choice until we’re forced into it.’
‘If we get through this room, Childe…’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m going back. You can’t stop me.’
‘You won’t do it, Celestine, and you know it.’
She glared at him, but said nothing. I think what followed was the longest five minutes in my life. None of us dared speak again, unwilling to begin anything — even a word — for fear that something like the ball would return. All I heard for five minutes was our own breathing; backgrounded by the awful slow thrumming of the Spire itself.
Then something slithered out of one wall.
It hit the floor, writhing. It was an inch-thick, three-metre-long length of flexible metal.
‘Back off…’ Childe told us.
Celestine looked over her shoulder. ‘You want me to press this, or not?’
‘On my word. Not a moment before.’
The cable continued writhing: flexing, coiling and uncoiling like a demented eel. Childe stared at it, fascinated. The writhing grew in strength, accompanied by the slithering, hissing sounds of metal on metal.
‘Childe?’ Celestine asked.
‘I just want to see what this thing actually—’
The cable flexed and writhed, and then propelled itself rapidly across the floor in Childe’s direction. He hopped nimbly out of the way, the cable passing under his feet. The writhing had become a continuous whipcracking now, and we all pressed ourselves against the walls. The cable — having missed Childe — retreated to the middle of the room and hissed furiously. It looked much longer and thinner than it had a moment ago, as if it had elongated itself.
‘Childe,’ Celestine said, ‘I’m making the choice in five seconds, whether you like it or not.’
‘Wait, will you?’
The cable moved with blinding speed now, rearing up so that its motion was no longer confined to a few inches above the floor. Its writhing was so fast that it took on a quasi-solidity: an irregularly shaped pillar of flickering, whistling metal. I looked at Celestine, willing her to palm the frame, no matter what Childe said. I appreciated his fascination — the thing was entrancing to look at — but I suspected he was pushing curiosity slightly too far.
‘Celestine…’ I started saying.
But what happened next happened with lightning speed: a silver-grey tentacle of the blur — a thin loop of the cable — whipped out to form a double coil around Celestine’s arm. It was the one Trintignant had already worked on. She looked at it in horror; the cable tightened itself and snipped the arm off. Celestine slumped to the floor, screaming.
The tentacle tugged her arm to the centre of the room, retreating into the hissing, flickering pillar of whirling metal.
I dashed for the door, remembering the symbol she had pressed. The whirl reached a loop out to me, but I threw myself against the wall and the loop merely brushed the chest of my suit before flicking back into the mass. From the whirl, tiny pieces of flesh and bone dribbled to the ground. Then another loop flicked out and snared Hirz, wrapping around her midsection and pulling her towards the centre.
She struggled — cartwheeling her arms, her feet skidding against the floor — but it was no good. She started shouting, and then screaming.
I reached the door.
My hand hesitated over the markings. Was I remembering accurately, or had Celestine intended to press a different solution? They all looked so similar now.
Then Celestine, who was still clutching her ruined arm, nodded emphatically.
I palmed the door.
I stared at it, willing it to move. After all this, what if her choice had been wrong? The Spire seemed to draw out the moment sadistically while behind me I continued to hear the frantic hissing of the whirling cable. And something else, which I preferred not to think about.
Suddenly the noise stopped.
In my peripheral vision I saw the cable retreating into the wall, like a snake’s tongue laden with scent.
Before me, the door began to open.
Celestine’s choice had been correct. I examined my state of mind and decided that I ought to be feeling relief. And perhaps, distantly, I did. At least now we would have a clear route back out of the Spire. But we would not be going forward, and I knew not all of us would be leaving.
I turned around, steeling myself against what I was about to see.
Childe and Trintignant were undamaged.
Celestine was already attending to her injury, fixing a tourniquet from her medical kit above the point where her arm ended. She had lost very little blood, and did not appear to be in very much discomfort.
‘Are you all right?’ I said.
‘I’ll make it out, Richard.’ She grimaced, tugging the tourniquet tighter. ‘Which is more than can be said for Hirz.’
‘Where is she?’
‘It got her.’
With her good hand, Celestine pointed to the place where the whirl had been only moments before. On the floor — just below the volume of air where the cable had hovered and thrashed — lay a small, neat pile of flailed human tissue.
‘There’s no sign of Celestine’s hand,’ I said. ‘Or Hirz’s suit.’
‘It pulled her apart,’ Childe said, his face drained of blood.
‘Where is she?’
‘It was very fast. There was just a… blur. It pulled her apart and then the parts disappeared into the walls. I don’t think she could have felt much.’
‘I hope to God she didn’t.’
Doctor Trintignant stooped down and examined the pieces.
EIGHT
Outside, in the long, steely-shadowed light of what was either dusk or dawn, we found the pieces of Hirz for which the Spire had had no use.
They were half-buried in dust, like the bluffs and arches of some ancient landscape rendered in miniature. My mind played gruesome tricks with the shapes, turning them from brutally detached pieces of human anatomy into abstract sculptures: jointed formations that caught the light in a certain way and cast their own pleasing shadows.
