“There was a storm,” Nyna said, “a bad snowstorm. There wasn’t a lot of wind, but it was coming down thick, piling up high. I started thinking I might be able to use the snow to my advantage. Since it packs so nicely, I wondered if I’d be able to build a kind of tent out of it, you know? I wasn’t sure if it would work, but I was getting kind of desperate. I was worried I’d get buried alive. So when I was picking my way through the rocks looking for a place to start building, I saw the snowflakes bouncing off of the temple door—no snow ever collects on it. I forgot about my snow house plan and found my shelter somewhere else. When the storm passed and I could come back, I tried to find it again. It was almost like I could see it, but not really. Like when you know there’s food cooking far away, and you can almost tell what it is, you know…”
She trailed off and stared at the pyramid. I got what she meant. Especially after my encounter with the Lakunae, I’d had many such experiences. Intuition could be a powerful thing if you were open enough to listen to it.
“Oh!” Nina suddenly said, startling me out of my thoughts. “I almost forgot I have Spirit Watcher.”
She lunged for her backpack, dug around inside, and threw the device over her head.
“Wow,” she whispered.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“You were right. This place is a lot bigger than I thought it was.” She turned her head slowly to the left, then to the right, up a little, then down.
“Damn,” she breathed. “We’re more or less right in the middle of it. I see… power conduits, I think. And nodes. And so much information. It’s amazing. I can see layers upon layers of information. Just… wow.”
“Anything that could lead us to some kind of secret door.”
She studied her surroundings for several seconds before answering. “There are two doors, actually.There and there.” She pointed with her head. “But they’re broken. Or the thing that opens them is broken, I think. It’s there, under my bed. Will you…?”
I didn’t wait for her to finish her sentence. As carefully as I could, I lifted her bed from the floor and set it against a wall. The floor was the same dark material as the walls and ceiling. The spot under her bed was completely smooth and featureless.
“Here?” I asked as I kneeled down and waved my hand at the floor.
“Yeah,” she said, kneeling next to me.
She tapped the floor with a finger, shook her head, and tapped somewhere else. She bounced back a second and cocked her head. Then she explosively pushed the floor with her palm, and a trapdoor popped opened.
“I found it!” she exclaimed.
The door was heavy, but she managed to lift it, and we peered inside. There was a control box of some kind with strange circuits. The boards themselves were translucent rectangles, about fifteen inches on the long sides, four on the short sides. There were no wires, diodes, nanochips, or anything else I recognized as technology. All I saw was tiny scratches.
Nyna yanked one of the boards free and held it up to a light on the wall. The scratches were perfect fine lines, circles, squares, and other shapes, combined in intricate patterns on both sides of the board.
“Can you fix it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she whispered, “I think I can. But it’s going to take some time, probably days. It’s like learning how to skin an animal. You mess it up the first few times, figure out what doesn’t work, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
I was happy for her, but I was also disappointed I couldn’t ride into battle piloting a huge Void-tech battlecruiser. All I’d have to do is park it above Thaz’red, fire a shot or two into the dictator’s palace, and demand Tortengar release his slaves immediately, including the Ish-Nul and any of my shipmates. If he refused, I could fire another few shots and collapse the place on top of him. That would be one problem solved.
Then, I remembered the communicators I’d taken from the guards at the powerplant. I’d gotten so used to them, I forgot the power they held.
“What about these?” I asked, holding them out to her. “Any chance you could change their frequency so that I can use them without Tortengar’s thugs listening in?”
She carefully took them from my hand. Her forehead creased as she inspected them.
“Oh, I can do a lot more than that,” she said. “This design is primitive. These things are capable of doing so much more. Did you know that if you put them on your head, you can hear what someone on the other end is saying?”
“Yeah,” I said, relieved they hadn’t gone to waste.
“Gimme a minute or two,” Nyna said as she curled her fingers around the communicators. “You’re gonna love what I do with them. But I don’t think we have time to fiddle with this door right now. We’ll come back.”
She dug in her backpack for a second before withdrawing a Void-tool that looked like someone had tried creating a screwdriver but ended up with something more like a corkscrew. She poked at the communicators for a minute and sent sparks flying twice before she declared victory.
She turned her face to me, her eyes visored by the Spirit-Watcher, as she grinned. “Not only can you talk to someone all secret-like now, but you can do it from a long way off!”
I held my hand out and inspected the devices. They didn’t look any different. “How far will they work?”
“No idea,” she admitted, her smile unwavering. “Maybe forever, but at least from here to Thaz’red.”
“Wow.”
“Pretty neat, huh? I can see all kinds of things with this Spirit-Watcher. Things I couldn't see before. It’s like I can see how stuff is supposed to work, like those communicators. I can see how the blue circuits are supposed
