shoulders tightening with sheer frustration, until at last she’d mastered it. The problem was, she couldn’t quite remember how she’d done it. She inches forward another few dozen centimeters, her hand still flat on the walkway’s surface, reaches out again and slides suddenly off the edge of the plane. She falls forward, catches herself clumsily, and hears Cerise swearing again behind her.
*I’m OK,* she says, and tries to pull her hand back. For a moment she can’t do it; the movement that should work just leaves her flailing in nothingness, and then, quite suddenly, she has it, and slides forward another meter, two meters, crawling, scrambling on hands and knees to get as far as she can before she loses the knack of it. Cerise follows, clumsily, a reassuring weight on her legs and ankles. Then at last they’ve turned the corner and the intangible pressure vanishes, as though the mirror is behind them and they are once again looking at the walkway itself.
Through the looking glass, Cerise says, and releases her hold on Trouble’s ankles.
Yeah, Trouble says, and pushes herself cautiously to her feet. But what happens when we hit IC(E)?
Cerise looks at her and doesn’t answer, stands up more slowly, scanning the volume around them. There is still no hint of IC(E), none of the metallic taste to the wind. *You don’t suppose there isn’t any.*
No, Trouble says, and Cerise smiles.
*Neither do I. But we’ll have to deal with it when we find it, won’t we?*
Trouble grins back, acknowledging the too-obvious logic of the other’s answer. It hides real concern, and real danger, and they both know it—but, as Cerise said, there’s no point in trying to anticipate it. Ahead, the walkway stretches empty, the silver ripples running ahead of their footsteps, travels perhaps fifteen, twenty virtual meters before it zigs again to skirt an encroaching plane. Trouble eyes that distant monolith warily, but starts walking toward it, feeling the walkway steady again underfoot.
She slows as she comes up on the turn, takes the time to check for IC(E)—there’s no sense in taking any risks, not here, not now— and, as she’d expected, finds nothing. She slides a foot forward, testing the path, takes five cautious, shuffling steps before she finds the point where the image reverses. She makes a sound, a sharp intake of breath, and Cerise’s hands close reassuringly tight around her waist.
How do you want to work it? Cerise asks.
Trouble doesn’t answer, but eases her foot forward, manages to take a step without going too far wrong, drifting too far to the left and the path’s edge. She takes a second step, Cerise braced behind her, ready to save them both, and then a third, and a fourth. It’s easier this time, something about the reflection is simpler, so that she passes through the backward space still standing, and draws Cerise after her onto the new straightaway.
Nice, Cerise says. She works her shoulders, loosening tight muscles, looks ahead toward the next pillar, and the monolith beyond that, where the path begins to zig back and forth at irregular and ever- decreasing intervals. *That, however—*
Yeah, Trouble answers. I see it. And she can smell something, too, they both can, the first faint whiff of IC(E) in the wind. For an instant she wonders if it’s worth it, if there’s anything real to be gained in this pursuit—after all, even if she, they, win, defeat the Mayor, the nets will turn a blind eye, say it’s because she was on the wire, or because there were two of them, anything to pretend it wasn’t a defeat, not of their hero—but she’s come too far to turn back now. She wants to win, to prove to herself if to no one else that she is better than the Mayor, and there’s newTrouble to consider as well. He is on the wire, family in that sense if not the other, and she owes him, as she would owe van Liesvelt or Arabesque, or, better example, Fate. For me, then, she thinks, and maybe for the kid, too.
*It’s still a long way off,* Cerise says. She stands in the center of the walkway, eyes fixed on the middle distance, on nothing in particular, tasting the wind. This is something she’s good at, better than Trouble, better than anyone they know, and she takes her time, teasing all the information she can out of the hint of a flavor. *Stationary, too, but powerful. I don’t recognize the style from here, but that may change as we get closer.*
Trouble nods, grateful for the insight—she can taste only the presence of the distant IC(E), not the subtle shifts and delicate differences—makes herself say, *You don’t have to come.*
Cerise looks at her blankly for an instant. *Don’t be stupid.*
Trouble hasn’t expected any other answer, but she’s momentarily startled by the intensity of her relief, grins because she can’t find the words. Cerise smiles back, touches her shoulder once, gently, the gesture carried through the brainworm, then looks ahead.
*Let’s go.*
They make their way along the elevated pathway, slowing each time they come to a minor reflection of a turn. Trouble is getting the knack of them now, as she learned to read the distorted reflection in the childhood toy, and she moves with more confidence, making her way around the corners now with only the occasional misstep. To either side, the black fog rises higher, though it’s impossible to tell if that’s because the floor, whatever, wherever, that may be, is rising too. It isn’t IC(E), however, and Trouble ignores it, concentrating on the maze ahead of them as the turns come closer together, offering less and less chance to recover from the effort of the previous corner. At least once, she thinks, they must have crossed their own path, but the mirror- display, the mirrored perception, makes it impossible for her to be certain. Cerise follows grimly, holding tight to Trouble’s icon, fighting an unexpected nausea. The abrupt shifts in perception, the effort of changing her point of view almost as soon as she’s settled on one, is overloading her system; her inner ear can’t quite keep up with the brainworm’s transmissions, and the pain in her hands is a nagging distraction.
Hang on, she says at last, and Trouble stops, looking back over her shoulder, eyebrows rising in question. Cerise ignores it, concentrates on her own system, and resets the brainworm, lowering the intensity of its display.
You all right? Trouble asks, and Cerise nods, impatient with herself.
I needed to reset, she says. *I’m OK now.*
Trouble hesitates, remembering—almost too late, she thinks— that Cerise has had troubles before with rapidly shifting perceptual fields, something like vertigo when her brainworm is set at its higher levels, but knows, too, that she has to trust Cerise. She nods back, starts again toward the next obstacle, three turns in quick succession that seem almost to loop the path back on itself, and feels the touch of a vagrant breeze on her face, cool against her skin. With that warning breeze, like the first soft breeze that comes before a storm, comes the smell of IC(E), damp metal, the tang of copper like the taste of fear.
Shit, she says, half to herself.
Cerise says, The center, there, at that loop. She sounds a little better, freed from the full intensity of the brainworm’s input; her tone is detached, analytical, too calm to be afraid.
Trouble considers the apparently empty space, the source of the vagrant wind, of the scent of IC(E), and the loop of walkway that seems to circle around it. She can only see so far, trace a portion of the line, before she loses her place, as though it is some kind of Mobius strip, or, worse yet, derived from one of the etchings beloved of crackers, where perspective twists and impossibly separate things are in fact intimately connected—where the waterfall is its own source and figures climb both sides of a stairway. It’s no wonder no one’s ever beaten the Mayor, she thinks, on the wire or not, then puts the fear aside. This has to be the Mayor’s inner sanctum, and she refuses to allow that it might not be—even the Mayor has technical limits, storage limits, she thinks, no matter how much time and space he’s liberated from other sources, and this has to be it. And if it isn’t, she thinks, well, I’ll keep going.
Any sense of what it is? To her, the IC(E) is just inchoate IC(E), the indistinguishable unspecific taste that means poison, danger.
Cerise tilts her head to one side, considers. *The Mayor’s work,* she says, and Trouble snorts.
*Tell me something I don’t know. *
*The Mayor’s work,* Cerise goes on, placidly, as though the other hasn’t spoken, *very like the outer walls, only woven tighter—reminds me a bit of my own work at Multiplane, too, but I can’t quite tell you how.*
