City on Fire

wallpaper behind, and then a cold voice whispers across Aiah’s thoughts.

—You interfere overmuch with my pleasures, lady.

Ice shivers Aiah’s bones. Her teeth chatter. But Taikoen does not speak again—he is gone—and Aiah slowly breathes out, summons her scattered thoughts, and makes visible her anima in the cousin’s apartment. She knows what she must do.

“Did anyone see what happened?” she says, and begins the official investigation that she hopes will never point in the right direction.

Afterward, Aiah’s had enough.

She takes off, her anima aimed straight up, rising fast as a bullet away from all this, from death and squalor and endless grinding duty. The city fades, a flat plain of brown and gray and green spread like a lily pad over its level sea. Get enough height, she thinks, and you’d never see the war. She tunes her senses to the air, feels its cool, burning touch as if it were her physical body climbing like a rocket, as if she were feeling the burning wind on her cheeks. She penetrates a layer of scattered white cloud and watches it fall away beneath her, become part of the increasingly abstract landscape below, a new bright element added to its jigsaw.

The Shield alone stands above her, barring her ascent—luminescent source of light and life for the world; impenetrable, energy-devouring barrier to the tens of billions crowded on the curved surface below—and as she gazes up at it, a cold anger settles into her. This is what has created her world, this barrier put by the Ascended in the path of humanity, allegedly as a punishment for sins that have only grown more obscure in the ages since. It is carefully sited, this Shield: a little higher, Aiah’s teachers told her in school, and objects could be put into an elliptical path that would circle the globe without falling—more evidence, if any were needed, that the Ascended Ones didn’t want anything or anyone sharing their realm.

The Shield’s pearly luminescence brightens, grows hot, becomes blazing white. Its power roars in Aiah’s transphysi-cal ears, and she knows it for an enemy. Matter that touches the Shield is annihilated, transformed into bursts of X rays. Plasm, the most powerful terrestrial force, vanishes as if it never were, anima-probes dissolving on contact, giving no information to the mages below and leaving them with nothing but bills for the plasm wasted. Nothing can touch the Shield and survive.

The sensation of wind is long gone—atmosphere is thin up here. Anger drives Aiah ever upward. Kill me, then, Aiah thinks at the Shield. Annihilate me and prove what a bastard you are.

The blazing whiteness of the Shield consumes her senses. She can feel its heat, its enmity. She knows it is near, and prepares for the touch of annihilation…

And then she is through it to someplace else, a place both of darkness and blazing light. To her astonishment she sees the Shield curving away beneath her, a perfect white sphere, its snarling energies intact.

Her staggered senses perceive mostly blackness—an emptiness so vast, so infinite, that she finds her own reactions, her very being, contrasted into insignificance. And there are structures, spidery things of silvery metal, each flying in the absolute silence of the void, rolling up toward the Pole… Without scale she can’t tell how large they are, but she suspects they are huge, each capable of containing a metropolis, despite their appearance of fragility… One, she counts, two, three, four, six, ten; many.

A spherical incandescence burns in the sky, white and angry as the Shield, a perfect sphere of raging light. It fixes the silvery surfaces of the flying structures in its glare, limning their surfaces with merciless precision, and it reflects as well off another spherical body, a green little marble with wisps of white cloud and strange, unnaturally brilliant splashes of blue. Part of it, a black unlit crescent, is in shadow.

One, Aiah thinks in staggered wonder, is the long-lost Sun, and the other the Moon.

And then another dimension infuses Aiah’s perceptions, as if a transparent sheet had been laid over the void, a sheet painted with another layer of actuality. The Sun, she sees, is also a person, a man who dances within the sphere of eternal flame. He wears a full sleek beard with the tip curled up, and a red conical hat with its peak pointed forward; there is a glowing sphere in one hand, and a silver rod in the other. He moves, stepping precisely but without hurry, an enigmatic smile on his lips, through a dance with no beginning and no end.

There is another dancer, Aiah sees, who is the Moon, a woman with gray skin—not mere pallor, but actually gray, gray as slate. Her black hair falls free in ringlets, and she wears a red flounced skirt and jeweled toe-rings on her bare feet. She, too, is dancing; Aiah suspects it is the same dance as the man in the Sun, the man who is the Sun—but if so, her long dark eyes never seek those of the dancing man, though her lips bear the same equivocal smile.

Aiah’s perceptions seem to shift again, and all the structures are gone, and with them the brilliant spheres, and even the Shield with the world below it; Aiah sees only dancers, some of them not even remotely human, stepping across the sky in an unhurried progression, a dance to the rhythm of eternity, to a music that has lasted for an age……

And then there is a snap, a sizzle, a flare in Aiah’s mind that fills her vision with molten silver and her ears with white noise; and she finds herself, breathless, in her chair in the op center, the t-grip in her hand, and looks down at the controls that show her broadcast horn still pulsing power, firing plasm straight at the Shield, where, presumably, it is being consumed.

She switches it off.

The Shield had briefly opened, she thinks, a tiny hole, and by chance she had flown through it, giving her a glimpse of what lies beyond; and then it had cruelly shut behind her, snapping off her plasm tether, returning her to her own world, to the war that is Caraqui.

SIXTEEN

The Adrenaline Monster rips Aiah from sleep—she sits up in bed, sucks in air, every sense straining for sign of danger. Her thoughts automatically perform a checklist: no explosions, no shellfire, no alarms.

No danger. The Adrenaline Monster is just keeping in practice.

She gasps for breath, her heart a trip-hammer beating against her ribs. A face with an ambiguous smile floats briefly before her eyes, a remnant of her dream, the Man who is the Sun.

She falls to the mattress, takes the pillow, crushes it to her chest. She tries to calm herself, to recapture the dream, her journey beyond the Shield, the Sun’s self-contemplative smile.

What is she to do? she thinks. Who can she tell?

Come to anyone babbling about the Ascended, she thinks, and she’ll get locked up. Or even worse, taken seriously…

Chosen. Charduq the Hermit insists that she is the redeemer of Barkazi, and even though he’s obviously been on his pillar far too long, there are people desperate enough to believe him.

And now she has apparently made the only visit beyond the Shield in millennia. And the terror of it is not what she saw there, but the thought that perhaps she was meant to see it. That the Ascended… or Someone… wanted her there, and that she has been chosen among all humanity to do… something.

And that doesn’t make sense, because she doesn’t know what she is intended to do, if anything. Any prophet she’s ever heard of knew what his visions meant—how to interpret them and how to act on what he knew. Aiah knows nothing: she saw things and people in the sky, and that’s all. If this is meant to have something to do with Barkazi, the connection eludes her.

But even if she doesn’t understand it, still the experience is hers. She doesn’t dare permit others to interpret it. Charduq would happily conclude that the gods, angels, and immortals all desire that she go forthwith and liberate Barkazi; and Constantine—well, Constantine would put it on video to subvert Landro’s Escaliers, or something.

So she doesn’t dare tell anyone. It must remain her secret until she can work out both what it means, and what it means for her.

A detonation slaps her awake. She was unaware that she’d even closed her eyes, that she’d lulled the