what she’d –
Ecko ripped down her image, screwed it the fuck up and threw it as far from him as he could, resignedly aware that it would bounce down the stairs and sit there, gleaming in the low throb of the light, until he picked it up again.
Beside him on the wall was the worn relief of a full-figured woman, dancing with Vegas abandon in the darkness. The light pulse flickered through her stone skin.
They were deep, down here, the air was damp and slimy stuff was growing in the walls. The light was as purple as bruising, now almost black. He didn’t need his UV to see the phosphor glow of the lichens, of fingernails and eye sockets. He remained invisible – but with the stilled, chilled gyrations round him, he felt like he was nightmare enclosed, heading down and down into some forgotten well-hole.
Yet Tarvi was there, her eyes afire, her hands on her breasts like the woman in the –
He looked back, upwards at the others, clambering weary legged and precarious down the worn, winding rock staircase, yawning drop to one side, hands trailing over the damp. In the almost-dark, the light glimmered over their skin, glittered from the gemstones in Triqueta’s cheeks. He had no idea how far down they were going. His telescopics were trashed: he couldn’t see shit under his own feet.
Above him, Tarvi and Redlock were sharing a joke. She was laughing prettily, her teeth shone with sudden blue-white, a flash in the mist of shadow. Triqueta shoved the axeman with a boot to shut him up.
The sight of them sent a lightning shock through him. Ecko couldn’t help it – his adrenals fired, his targeters reacted.
Unthinking, he stood on his cloak hem, overbalanced and rocked for a moment at the stair’s outside, black fall yammering at him. As he regained his balance, his adrenals had triggered – his heart was in his mouth, his pulse rate screaming gunfire in his temples. Then he was slumped against the wall, against the bare, slime-slick breasts of the dancer.
Struggling to breathe like some fucking wheezing asthmatic.
Tarvi was there, a shape in the darkness, a hand on his forearm. Her nails glowed with a flicker of electro- varnish. He could imagine her touch sending heat ripples through the almost-black colours of his skin.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Get the fuck off me.” His rasp was low. He drew back from her, dropped a step. Bruised light crossed her face, her expression was closed. She looked –
“Oi,” Redlock said. “If she wants to care for you, let her. Don’t want you slowing us down.”
He had no energy for fury.
“You wanna flying lesson?”
The axeman’s grin became a laugh.
“Might be more of a diving lesson. Triq says –”
“Triq says, we’re near the bottom,” Triqueta said. “Can’t you feel it?”
The air was cooler, almost cold. Their voices had changed: no longer echoing, lost into the distance.
Triqueta held out her hand, turned it over. Ecko’s starlites showed him a plume of fine sand, sparkling as it tumbled slowly past. It made lazy whorls in the air.
“There’s a draught,” Redlock said.
Cursing silently, Ecko flicked options, kicked his UV.
Mom had never made his oculars to deal with this shit, any of it. Every which way, his enhancements were failing, breaking.
They’d found the bottom of the shaft.
Twenty metres or so below him was pure black light, a pool of it, a mirror of it, a still, flat shine of dark illumination.
Ecko was no sparky, but he totally got that the Monument stones were some kind of node – they were pulling energy, storing it. Zapping it down the walls. And feeding it here – this thing was some sort of capacitor.
But then what?
Ecko found that he wanted – needed – to blow his way through, to announce his presence with detonation and destruction. To rip the whole thing wide open and uncover what lay below.
He missed London. Life was so much easier with hardware.
“There’s something else here,” he muttered. “Where’s the draught comin’ from – Maugrim leave the door open?”
“I wonder what’s on the other side?” Tarvi grinned wickedly at him, the deep lights playing upon the curves of her face. He loved the mischief in her expression. He wished he could show her,
“Apparently so,” Redlock said. “Ecko, I know she’s cute, but keep your head in the game.”
Ecko shot him an LED eye-flash, a sneer.
The stairway ended in a stone landing – a drop point the size of a virtual dance-pad. No balcony, no security – a tiny, solid square of safety suspended like a dock over the bottomless battery-stone-of-doom.
It was compelling. At the bottom of the stairs, Ecko crouched on the edge of the platform, shadow within shadow, contemplating the shine...
...and looking for something to throw. Y’know. Just in case.
In the wall was a single entranceway, a massive stone lintel, cracked with age, grown with green stuff, carved with phosphor-glitter eyes. It had an eerie, carnival appearance.
Tarvi came to stand beside him, her leg touching his shoulder.
Behind them, Redlock swore – he’d turned his ankle on the slippery step.
She was a pressure of warmth, her reflection a silhouette. In its darkness, her eyes gleamed white, shards of light were caught under her nails, making them almost clawlike. Somehow, her reflection looked monstrous, inhuman. Still, the nearness of her caught in his throat, his belly – the heat of the contact made his blood rage and his lip curl. He stood up, closing his cloak with a deliberate, concealing action.
As he did so, she turned to him – and something caught his attention.
Something about her reflection – something...
For a second, he was stone still as if hit by a basilisk. Then, flesh crystallising in certainty, he watched her reflection, her ghost shadow, disbelieving,
She couldn’t be... He couldn’t’ve been
The query was pointless. The ghost was still there, over and above her. And he knew
“Question,” Redlock was saying. He’d moved to cover the doorway, axes in hands. “If this Maug-rim is expecting visitors... why haven’t we been attacked? Right now, we’re as vulnerable as a ’prentice with a cauldron for a helmet – where’re the shock-troops? I’d have shot me right off the damned wall.”
“You can’t shoot for shit,” Triq told him.
“True enough.” Redlock chuckled and the sound rolled back from the slick, carved walls. “I’d’ve made you do it.”
Ecko wasn’t really listening. He was staring at Tarvi’s silhouette, now side-on. Out there in the stone shine, or whatever-the-fuck it was, tiny spasms of light flickered like eels.
Some part of his mind shrieked at him,
