WE DID NOT HAVE to go far.

Kharn’s SOM guards marched us toward the low concrete structures that clung to the rocks below the seawall like mushrooms. Ren and Suzuha had said there was a geothermal power station that fed the pyramid and the old Mericanii installation up above. I expected heat, but the room they packed us into was cold almost as the greater cavern outside. Our breath frosted the air as we were hurried inside, and though I shouted at the soldiers, neither they nor the Master who moved behind their lifeless eyes listened.

They stripped me of my sword, naturally, and of my pencil kit—for the scalpels, I assumed—and even my terminal, small good it would have done me. Valka was similarly stripped of her weapons, though the nature of her praxis was such that it could not be taken from her without killing her.

They left without a word, and the heavy metal door ground shut.

And we were trapped.

Alone.

Though the water had long since run off my clothes, my hair was still soaked from my black baptism and my experience with the monster, Brethren, and I shivered, collapsing onto a bench beside the door to our cell. How long I sat there I cannot say, staring at nothing, not taking in my surroundings.

“What the hell was that?” Valka asked. From her tone I knew it was not the first time she’d asked me.

I shook myself, trying to shake off the memory of Brethren and its grasping hands. “I’ve no idea.” I clenched my hands, distracted as I often was by the hoop of cryoburn scar that circled my left thumb. “No, I . . . sorry,” I coughed, then punched myself in the chest a couple times to try and clear it. “It said it was a daimon. One of your AI.”

“’Twas no AI,” Valka said, half-turning away.

“It . . . they said they were made of sinew. Or . . . well, they implied they were made of”—I felt my voice falter, and the next word emerged as little more than a breath—“people.” I found suddenly that I could only look at my hands, only doing so recalled those other hands, paler than my own, their flesh mottled and scabrous with new growth, and I closed my eyes entire.

The sound of Valka’s boots on the concrete floor tapped against my awareness, and I heard her say, “Neuronal tissue, yes. That makes sense.” I looked up at her. She was hugging herself, head bent, hair covering her face. “It makes for better processing substrate than dry computers.”

“Dry?” I asked, then, “Oh.”

“You know, my neural lace is made of my own cells, except the shunt,” she explained, and here tapped the back of her head just at the base of her spine, where I knew the delicate porcelain node lay hid beneath her red-black hair. She hugged herself again. “But that . . . thing.”

My tongue was very dry, despite and perhaps because of the memory of the water I had swallowed. “It said it was one of the Mericanii.”

“Impossible!” Valka said shortly, dismissing the notion with a hand. “They were all destroyed.”

I was shaking my head. “This place is ancient, Valka. Look around you.”

We both did, then, for the first time. The room into which we’d been placed had the look of some ancient guardhouse or dormitory, though what beds there once had been were long since gone. All was drab concrete, cracked and crumbling, and where here and there the floor was worn and uneven from the eons’ passage of too many feet, water puddled. Scant light shone its sickly silver, making the whole place flat and uninviting as the hall of some ill-kept sanitarium. There were no windows, though in the dark outside I could not be sure what we would have seen. Later exploration would reveal a poor toilet—little more than a hole in the floor with a seat over it—and a crate of old ration bars hard as shoe leather. Such was to be our only fare for the long weeks of our imprisonment.

After an unsteady quiet, I said, “It is possible this place is . . . or was some sort of Mericanii colony. A fort, maybe.”

“From the Foundation War?” Valka shook her head. “Only if we traveled farther than we thought. Those Mericanii colonies weren’t much more than fifty light-years from Old Earth system.”

“I’ve no idea how fast the Enigma could travel.”

“But thousands of light-years?” Valka drummed her fingers against her upper arm. “The Exalted’s warp drives would have to be . . . well, orders of magnitude better than anything I’ve ever heard of.”

I had nothing to say to this, and so—for once in my life—said nothing. You might imagine that I could not shake off the horror of those grasping hands and the sound of those ragged voices on the water, but it was the other part of my experience, the vision Brethren had showed me, that lingered more strongly. I never achieved the perfect clarity of recall that the scholiasts boast of, nor was I ever such a one gifted with the clearest of memories. Perhaps that was what first drove me to my art. Whatever the reason, the memory of my vision beneath the waters of Brethren’s sea has never left me. I can recall the falling of each raindrop as I battled that Cielcin lord, every petal of the white-flower gown my princess wore as she sat at my feet. I can recall every death I saw myself endure, and feel the way my body shook beneath the murmur of those unheard words as clearly as I see the busts of the ancients in their niches above the desk where I write this account.

They are of porphyry, that stone most prized by Justinian of old. They are—in fact—the same statues I saw in my vision: the chiseled faces of scholars long dead. The obligatory sculpt of Imore is here, placid and wide-eyed beneath the bust of Zeno. There are Hypatia and Lovelace, and the patron of the chapter here: old Peterson with his knowing smile. There is even a bust of Gibson. Not my Gibson, but his namesake: an especially gaunt-looking fellow, not unlike myself, with a severe widow’s peak and pointed chin that made him look like nothing so much as a kindly if befuddled vampire.

Looking at them now, in my exile, I see them as part of the vision Brethren shared with me, and hear myself say, “Valka . . . it, they—the AI, I mean—did you hear what it said?”

She shook her head, leaned against the wall. “No. I was too far away.”

“It told me about the Quiet,” I said. And explained.

All the while, I watched Valka’s face, waiting for a trace of the old scorn and condemnation to flicker in those bright eyes, to tighten a muscle in that sharp jaw, to wrinkle her nose. They never did. Her face was unreadable as those of the statues watching me as I write these words. She did not interrupt or grow cold. Only stood there unmoving while I felt myself shrink beneath her gaze.

“It sounds mad, I know.” I ran hands through my still-damp hair. The water smelled foul. I smelled foul. Like the storm drains in Borosevo in the midst of plague. “You really didn’t hear any of it?”

She shook her head again. “I was too far away.”

“You must think I’m mad,” I said. I could not look at her.

Valka let out a long, almost whistling breath before saying, “Hadrian, after what we just saw . . . I think we’re both mad.” Without looking, I could hear the smile in her voice. I smiled too, in spite of all that I had seen and the direness of our situation. Whatever else we were, we were not alone. “But . . . the future?” Valka said. “How is that possible?”

I cleared my throat. “When we were on the Enigma, Switch and I went exploring. We got separated, and I found this sort of . . . carnival sideshow. The sort the Eudorans set up when they come to a new world. It was run by this Exalted with skin like rough plaster. He showed me his crewmate—I think they were mates, at any rate. The other chimera was damaged. They said he’d encountered some sort of alien microorganism that altered his perceptions. They said he could . . . could see time. Like it were some other sort of space. And so they were using it as a kind of fortune teller.”

All the while I looked at my hands, certain that Valka would laugh. Would scorn me. Would turn away in disgust and stony silence. She did no such thing. Instead she said, “Was it the Deeps?”

My head snapped upward. “You’ve heard of them?”

Her lips quirked. “Hadrian, I’m a xenologist. Of course I’ve heard of them.”

“They’re real, then?”

“I’ve never seen one, but . . . yes, they exist.” Here she lowered herself to the floor, sitting with her legs apart, knees rising almost so high as her shoulders. “They’re on about a dozen worlds, all fairly close together in a cluster in the Upper Centaurus. There are signs of an ancient civilization on those worlds: a few pieces of what we think are statues, an old building or two buried in the mountains. But it’s been so long there’s almost nothing left.”

“Not the Quiet, then?”

“No, they’re much older. We don’t really know anything about them, except that they left the Deeps.”

“Leopards, lions, and wolves,” I repeated, and shrugged my coat around me.

Valka arched one eyebrow. “Excuse you?”

“Just something Brethren said.” I waved it away, asked, “What are they? The Deeps, I mean.”

Valka shrugged. “Some kind of microorganism, like you said. A kind of living computer, maybe? They’re supposed to have the power to change life on the atomic level. You hear stories of people who wade in wanting to be young or beautiful—”

“—or to see time?” I interrupted.

“Or to see time,” Valka agreed. “You think Brethren was like that?”

“Only in that they could perceive time,” I replied. “But I’m not sure. It’s just all so strange.” I saw my own head looking up from the ground at my feet, felt the rain lash me as I drew my sword to face the lord of all Cielcin—the lord of all Cielcin? That made no sense. The Cielcin were scattered, divided, without central authority or power. Earth knew how many disparate clan-fleets then sailed between the stars. They had no leader, and yet I knew what I had seen.

We must be.

“We must be,” I murmured.

“What’s that?”

“Just . . . something they said.” I leaned my head against the wall at my back. The concrete was cold, and with my wet hair I began to shiver. I was glad at least that my clothes had dripped dry. “What do you think Kharn will do with us?”

Valka pulled her jacket tight about her and tucked her chin. “Leave us to rot, likely.” She crossed her arms. “Until he needs us—imbal sida, it’s cold!” Without thinking, I stood and swept the greatcoat from my shoulders. I still wore my black tunic beneath, and passed the jacket to Valka without a word. She looked up at me, a crease forming between her brows. “Are you sure?”

Chafing my arms to warm them, I gave a weary nod, then took a moment to button the side closure of my tunic all the way up to the throat. It wasn’t much help, but it was something. “Brethren said Kharn would have a use for us,” I mused, watching Valka pull my heavy coat around herself. “So I don’t think we’re in any immediate danger.” For a moment, I considered seating myself beside her, but I thought better of it—fearing Valka would resent such closeness—and resumed my spot on the bench.

We were quiet then a long time, neither speaking, neither knowing what to say. I might have slept—so exhausted was I—but I feared to sleep, feared to dream whatever dreams would come in the wake of that day’s revelations. I feared, too, the eldritch creature that slumbered in the depths. I half-imagined its snaking hands would slip through some crack in the walls or floor and find me, or else its words would slither again into the dark recesses of my brain.

I set myself to exploring the room, and it was then I found our grim toilet and the grimmer crate of ration bars. It felt good to walk around, and though I paced like a lion in its cage I felt a modicum of warmth bleed into me. What water there was to be had came from a truly ancient sink. The water was bitter and oily—not quite saline but with that unpleasant aftertaste that said it had been saline. I tried not to think of the black ocean and of Brethren wallowing in its depths.

“Hadrian!” Valka called, and at the sound of her voice I returned, hurrying down the long and narrow chamber. “What’s this?” She held up her palm for me to see. I stood puzzled a long moment, unsure. She held a chip of white stone, rough about the edges and sharp. I stared at it a long while, unable to ascertain just why it looked so familiar to me, or why the sight of it sat like lead shot in my guts. Valka frowned up at me and asked, “’Tis some sort of tile?”

I took it, unable to shake the sense of significance—of meaning—that moved in me.

And then I realized.

“That’s not possible,” I breathed, words little more than whisper. I had grown too used to saying those words, that day of all days.

“What’s not possible?” Valka asked.

It weighed almost nothing, and yet I bore it with great strain, as though it were some insect I feared to crush in my clumsy hands.

“It was in the sanctum,” I said, turning it over. “In the cradle. In my dream.” For a moment, I thought I heard again the baroque chiming of the music box in my ears—that lullaby for a child I had not seen.

Valka stood then, my coat tails nearly dragging the ground, for she was shorter than me and narrower of beam. “But what is it?”

“It’s a shell,” I said, prodding it across my palm with a finger. I said the words with such conviction. “A piece of it broke off when I touched it in the cradle, I . . . I must have put it into my pocket when the vision crumbled.” I laughed then. “Listen to me: I’ve gone mad.”

She moved closer to get a better look at the thing in my hand. She was very close then. I could sense the warmth of her in that cold room. “You’re sure ’tis what this is?”

“What else could it be?”

“Any of five million different things.”

Ah, Valka. Ever the skeptic. Still I shook my head, and with tense jaw replied, “I know what I’m saying.” The substance of it was a color brighter than white, so that it made my chalky hand seem red by comparison. Snowfields I have seen—unploughed and untrammeled by feet for a thousand times the life age of our Empire—that were not so white as that pure substance. Indeed I fancied that some alchemist in the forgotten deeps of time—or indeed in the deeps of time yet to be—had extracted some divine essence from some higher world to make that thing I held. Whiter than white. White itself. “It’s as white as the stone at Calagah is black.” I realized that I had spoken before I’d thought, and so surprised myself.

“’Tis your professional opinion, that?” Valka asked, a glimmer of the steel in her tone behind its velvet scabbard.

“I don’t have a professional opinion,” I said, “but I’m not wrong.”

“No?” Valka took a step back. I was unsure if she mocked me or merely prodded me along.

I was a long time in answering. I’d no notion how long Valka and I were to be locked in that dank and frigid place, and I had no stomach for a protracted campaign against the woman. She could believe me or not, but I had no stomach for mockery. Not anymore. But I would not argue. I knew what I knew.

“It’s true,” I said, and closed my fist around the white fragment. “It’s all true. There was too much in common between what Brethren showed me and what I saw in Calagah. I don’t understand it, but I think that what Brethren said must be true, and that whatever power reached out to Brethren was the same that touched me then.” I could feel the edges of the bit of shell cutting into the flesh of my palm and eased up, half-expecting to find blood welling up there. “What am I supposed to do, Valka?” Looking up, I found her staring at me, her face . . . utterly unreadable. “They said I was supposed to fight.”

Her hand found mine, seized me by the wrist. Our eyes met, and she said, “We are fighting.”