Wasteland of flint

'Aiii…it is dawn. The storm.'

Together, they walked quickly back toward the cliff. Gretchen's feet were sore – she hoped she didn't have to run anywhere today – but she was more concerned with the odd way her sight was behaving. Suspicious, Gretchen changed the setting on her goggles to normal intensification. The shale and broken sandstone she was crossing remained sharp and distinct, despite the predawn darkness cloaking the land. I can see in the dark?

She stopped and bent down, running a hand across scattered chunks of eggshell-thin stone. A dissonant, queasy feeling roused, stirred by the motion of her fingers against something standing still. Gretchen slashed her hand back and forth, as fast as she could. Odd and odder, she thought, grappling with a perception of her hand moving very slowly, with sort of a staccato afterimage trailing along behind.

'Check the tie-downs.' Hummingbird turned toward the overhang without looking back. 'The filament screen needs to be repaired.'

Gretchen looked up, catching a furtive glimpse of the nauallis stepping past the glistening sheet of monofilament. At the same time, she saw him both outside and inside the barrier. Anderssen blinked in surprise, lifted her goggles and rubbed her eyes. When she looked again, the tripartite vision was gone.

'Hurry,' his voice echoed. 'The wind will be rising soon.'

The storm shrieked and wailed against the filament screen blocking the entrance to the cave. A rain of sand rattled endlessly against the magnetically-stiffened monofilament before slithering down into a steadily growing drift. A sustained high-pitched ringing – Gretchen thought it came from the cables holding down the ultralights – shivered in the air. She turned her face from the glowing, saffron-yellow light filtering down through the storm and the filament screen. Hummingbird was sitting with his back to a chunk of basalt, staring at nothing.

Gretchen scraped the last of a threesquare from the bottom of a battered steel cup. Today she was so hungry the sludge didn't need chile sauce to make it palatable. She waved the spoon in the air experimentally, but the blurred – or tripled – vision effect had faded. There was only a metal spoon in the dim light of the cave.

'Last night…' she started to describe what she'd seen, but then changed her mind. 'I would feel stupid about running,' Gretchen said, glaring at the old Mйxica, 'but you were running too. So what did come out of the cave? Were we ever in any danger?'

'We were,' Hummingbird replied. He seemed tired, too. 'Even at the end, when they had no more substance than a shadow, we were still in danger. I thought…' He stopped, considering his words. 'When you ran, I feared things would go badly for you. I am glad they did not. We were lucky.'

'We were idiots – I was an idiot,' Gretchen said in a very sharp tone. 'They ate the energy released by the Sif bullets, didn't they? If I hadn't done that, we'd have been able to walk right out.'

'You did not know what would happen. I did not know either.' Hummingbird made a dismissive gesture. 'And I wonder if they did eat the bullets from your gun. I'm not sure they had the strength to do so. We might have seen only an echo of what the substance experienced. A living, moving memory.'

'I saw a flechette in one, hanging in the air, as if the explosion itself had slowed down and was being consumed!'

'I wonder…' Hummingbird raised an eyebrow wryly. 'If we go into the tunnel and examine the rear wall, it may be we find the impact marks of each and every flechette – if the entire passage has not collapsed as a result of the explosions.'

Gretchen's face screwed up in a disbelieving grimace. 'Does this happen a lot with your sight? '

'Sometimes.' Hummingbird's expression turned grim. 'Achieving clarity does not mean you have learned to discern truth from falsehood. The world around us is filled with too much data. Why else would our infant minds learn to hide so much from our consciousness? Some students are blinded by the clarity they achieve.' He raised two fingers. 'This is the second obstacle a student must overcome: control of sight.'

'How long,' Gretchen said, rather suspiciously, 'does that take?'

'Years.' Hummingbird's voice was flat. His right hand twitched. 'The drug I gave you…is a shortcut. But one usually given only to students who have passed the first obstacle.'

'Which is?' Gretchen's lips drew tight and a dangerous glitter entered her eyes. What was in that packet? What did he do to me?

'The first obstacle is fear, Anderssen-tzin. It is to achieve clarity of mind before you attain clarity of sight.' The nauallis shrugged. 'I admit giving you the teonanacatl was a throw of the beans. I was hasty.'

Gretchen swallowed, her throat dry with a bitter aftertaste, and she drank deep from one of the water bottles. Even the stale, metallic taste was preferable to the flat, oily fluid from her recycler. 'You seem to be a very reckless man, Hummingbird-tzin. Are you well regarded by your fellows?'

The nauallis did not reply, his eyes becoming guarded again. Gretchen stood up and put her cup and spoon away, stowing them in the little cook kit from her rucksack. Nervously, she paced the perimeter of their shelter, listening to the storm wailing outside and peering through the filament at the Gagarin. Both Midge s seemed to be intact, though they were straining against the sand anchors like hounds against the leash. Finally, when the unsettled, churning feeling in her stomach had leveled off to a dull burn, she examined her hands in the dim, sulfurous light from outside.

Gloves. Fingers. They seemed entirely ordinary. Can I focus? How do I…

She concentrated, trying to discern the superlatively sharp level of detail she'd perceived before, where every grain and pore and wrinkle in the gloves came into view. Nothing happened. Her head started to hurt. Scowling, she pushed up her goggles and rubbed both eyes wearily. Stupid clarity…nevermind.

'What are we going to do about the tunnel and chambers?' Gretchen hugged herself, feeling cold despite the suit heaters. 'Don't you have to 'clean it up' somehow?'

Hummingbird nodded slowly. He pointed at the entrance to the overhang. 'In my Midge there are explosives, somewhat more powerful than your shockgun. When the daystorm clears, I will go into the tunnel and place them.'

Gretchen laughed, unaccountably relieved to hear something so mundane and practical from the old man. 'You're going to blow the place up? Now that does sound like the Empire at work!'

'Each tool,' he said stiffly, 'to a purpose. Those structures serve as a focus for this 'color' we saw. They allow something to take a shape where it should have none. So, I will destroy the entire location and hope – hope, mind you – the memories clinging to the stones and rocks themselves are scattered into oblivion.'

'And the cylinders we saw in the inner room?' Gretchen clenched her fists tight against her sides. 'You'll bury them under a million tons of rock?'

Hummingbird nodded slowly, watching Gretchen's face intently. 'I will.'

'What about Russovsky? What do you think happened to her?'

'She stumbled into part of a dream, someplace where a fragment of this sleeping power seized and consumed her. In that moment, she was taken over, into its context, rather than our own. Something came back out – the shape you saw in the first cave – like a ghost, perhaps curious, perhaps a reflex of her own memory. Even a shape retains memory of its past.'

'The version of her on the ship was only an echo?' Gretchen tried not to lick her lips nervously. 'Do you think she might have survived the experience? Maybe she woke up later and found her ultralight gone, taken by the copy?'

Hummingbird was nonplussed. His eyes narrowed in suspicion. 'Have you seen something to indicate she survived?'

'I…no, no I haven't seen anything I could swear was real.'

'But you saw Russovsky, or something which looked like her.' The nauallis gave her a sharp look. 'Last night? When the gray was upon you?'

'Afterward,' she admitted. 'When the gray – the visions – had passed. She helped me up. I felt her hand – a physical hand – in mine!'

'And then?' The nauallis rose and came to her side. His green eyes were tense and sharp. Gretchen could feel him looking at her. The sensation made her skin crawl and she