It was as if Jools had happily given Terese the precise description of an imaginary landscape. Which was impossible, for that evening Jools had been no more capable of lying than of flying. And Jools wouldn’t have made many errors in her retelling, given her passion for architecture and urban planning.
Terese almost scrunched the map in her fingers. What was going on?
She shifted the paper irritably. The scale was perfect. She’d checked! There had to be something obvious she couldn’t see. What was it?
The clock in the corner chimed twelve times at the same moment dozens of other library clocks took up the chorus. She couldn’t concentrate. She let go of the paper with one hand to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear. As she did, the paper slipped downward from Sumad Reach.
South?
Her curse echoed though the room as the chimes finished.
Of course, some dimensions and landmarks were off-target, but everything generally matched. There were differences though, for where Jools had described the bustling markets just short of the Hem Kader, were the trading grounds south of Sumad Reach. A similar landmark, certainly. Then, Jools’s open-spaced town squares coincided with empty housing lots south of the trade grounds. The abandoned, empty spaces of the Hem Kader corresponded to the dilapidated borderlands, leading toward the Refugee Territories in the south.
“Closing time,” came a woman’s voice from behind her. The skinny librarian fidgeted with her hair tie.
Terese jolted. “All right!” she snapped.
A lump rose in her throat. She had a feeling where the map’s destination was leading. She tracked the route south to the finishing point. The antique shop Jools’s complement always ended up visiting, surrounded by struggling clothing stores, questionable food vendors and shacks. But the library’s map said that area was vacant and abandoned! And it could be no place for retailers, for she’d seen it with her own eyes. The antique store Jools’ complement routinely visited was no store at all. It was the ‘workshop’ that Terese, Jools and Toornan had found. The one with the horribly strong chaos surges, where humans had been torn apart and every ornament, tool and upright surface destroyed.
That was why the complement had taken such enormous stores of water on their wagons—working pipes were scarce in Chastity Territory. That was why Toornan hadn’t tracked the complement further west—they’d turned abruptly south after removing their plate.
Gods, Terese had even seen the wheel tracks at the workshop!
“Don’t you have a home to go to?” the librarian hissed.
Terese was panting. “Right. Yes,” she called.
Get yourself under control, Saarg.
She shut the folder and stuffed the sketch into her pocket, ignored the librarian’s terse farewell and hurried back to her apartment.
Chaos mechanisms. She’d traced the chaos mechanism trading route to that strange workshop. And Jools’s dark ops team was visiting there.
She didn’t put on her bulbs when she reached her apartment. Instead she stared up at the half-moon.
These chaos mechanisms could be related to why Lijjen was studying golem. Had his group tested some proto-artifact or anti-golem technology?
Gods, that was it. A golem! At that workshop. Sumad Reach had created and tested some sort of golem, which had gone rogue and killed its makers. Was the golem roaming Polis Sumad’s Refugee Territories right now, crazed and homicidal? If it was, the Refugees were in danger—at least they already had their massive Walls to fend against the cadvers. But if a golem—which Seekers shouldn’t have been able to create—was tearing people apart in the Wastes, then what had scrambled Jools’s brain into this hallucination? Into unknowingly breaking the very natural laws the Seekers had sworn to protect?
Gods, the potential damage to Jools was terrifying. For all Terese knew, Jools’s brain could be melting into dysfunction each passing day, or programming her to kill herself when this mystery project was complete.
A week earlier she’d convinced herself the dead of the Armer Immersion Chamber deserved justice. A justice she could slowly and quietly grind into creation.
But this pushed everything into urgency. Terese had to protect her complement.
16
Breathe, Terese. Keep your hands steady.
Gently, slowly, she turned the two pins in the lock. A rusty whine trailed from the cylinder, narrating the pins’ rotation. She’d been at this for three minutes already, far longer than she’d allowed in her practice runs. And it wasn’t just the lock that was overloud, but also her shaking breathings and frantic heartbeat. All three taken together would surely wake the dead, or worse, the apartment’s inhabitants.
The faint click, muffled by the wooden door, was warm as a sunrise. She removed the pins and leaned gently against the door, gathering her breath before slipping the tools back into their thin leather wallet. From her satchel, she retrieved the wooden implement she’d spent a week crafting by hand. She pushed the door slowly open. A silver chain binding the door and doorframe slowly straightened as she pushed on the door.
No hint of movement beyond. Despite the lock’s difficulty, her plan was still working. To make certain, she rolled the dial at the side of her new helmet. It took some seconds for her lenses to shift from green-tinged infrared to thermal. The foggy display showed two reclined orange and red forms hovering some twenty feet away. The thermal vision didn’t show their bed. She switched back to infrared.
Not only her helmet was new, but also her entire set of plate. Anyone watching her would assume the wearer was a female Sumadan Head, given the plate’s earthy red undertones and silver joints. Her Armer plate lay unused in her apartment closet.
She’d desperately wished the door hadn’t opened. For it to have been bolted from within. If so, she could have gone back to her apartment to ponder her next move and sleep easily, possibly deciding to do away with this absurd gambit altogether when she woke.
But no, dammit, her plan was working.
She clenched her teeth and went through practiced motions, sliding
